Leroy Sané has been one of Manchester City’s undoubted successes of the season. The former Schalke winger may not have been an instant sensation – it took him a while to adjust to a new country and the physical demands of the Premier League – but from the moment he scored his first goal in England against Arsenal in December he has never looked back. Suddenly, it was possible to see what had impressed Pep Guardiola so much in the Bundesliga. Even the fee of £37m began to look less excessive. During the brief period when Gabriel Jesus was able to link up with Sané in the City attack, the evidence was even more compelling: here was a player for the future, someone you could build a team around.

Arsenal are the opponents again at Wembley on Sunday afternoon and Sané, who has nine goals to his name, is up against one of his best friends. He is in touch with Mesut Özil on a weekly basis, after the European Championships last summer the pair headed off to America on holiday, and he credits his Germany team-mate for helping make his path into international football so smooth.

“The first time I was called up for Germany it was Mesut who decided to look after me,” Sané says. “He told me if I ever had any kind of problem he would try to help me out and that is exactly what he did. For sure, he helped me a lot. So now we call each other regularly and sometimes I meet him in London as a friend.

“He is a bit older than me but he can be just like a kid sometimes, especially on holiday in California. We did the tourist attractions, enjoyed the weather and did our best not to talk about football. But when I call him up now I can discuss how my career is going. Sometimes it’s good to have older friends. They have a lot more experience.”

The first night of Sané’s international career turned out to be traumatic in a way that not even Özil’s experience could have led him to predict. He made his debut for the senior Germany side in Paris in November 2015, the night the city was attacked and the teams ended up staying overnight at the stadium because it was considered too risky to travel back to their hotels. “It was quite a night,” he recalls. “At the beginning I was very happy and proud, it was my first game for my country. The events after the game turned it into a deeply upsetting memory, even a negative one. It totally counteracted the feeling from earlier.”

Sané claims to have no knowledge of this, though there is a feeling in Germany that Joachim Löw accelerated the player’s debut for fear of losing him to France. Sané holds passports for both countries and could have taken a different option. “I wasn’t really interested in doing that,” he says. “I was born in Germany, grew up in Germany, and when I was becoming a professional footballer I felt like a German.”

While the time that Sané’s father, Souleyman, spent in the French army and the international caps he won for Senegal might have left several options open to his son in terms of nationality, there seems to have been little doubt that young Leroy would grow up a sportsman. In addition to playing 55 times for Senegal, Souleyman was leading scorer in the Austrian League for Tirol Innsbruck and for Freiburg in Bundesliga 2 in his time, and he married an Olympic gymnast in Regina Weber.

All three of the Sané children were on Schalke’s books at one time and Leroy’s two brothers still are. Sané claims he gets his pace from his father, who once clocked 10.7sec for 100m, and his grace and balance from his mother, but surely what everyone wants to know is what family mealtimes were like in such a sporting hothouse? “Normal, I would say,” comes the surprising answer. “My parents knew what I should be eating to prepare for a football career but they weren’t pushy or strict about it. They gave me the choice. They made sure I knew what was best to eat but they never told me I couldn’t eat certain things. There was no pressure, if I wanted to go to McDonald’s they said OK, so sometimes I did.”

Sané is on his own in a new city so his parents and other friends from Germany come over to see him as often as they can. “I like living here, I still see a lot of my family and they have seen a lot of games,” he says.

He admits it took him a while to express himself on the pitch, putting it down to a mixture of nerves and inexperience. “I was young, and playing against big players and big clubs,” he says. “In the beginning I was thinking they were better than me and maybe I was a bit scared also. I was in a new country and a new league and it was completely different to what I was used to in the Bundesliga.

“I had come off the back of a long season with Schalke and Germany, Manchester City had paid a lot of money for me and I was probably trying to do everything too quickly. In the end Pep Guardiola came to me and said: ‘Play like you used to for Schalke, because you were free there.’ That seemed to help, you can’t help but feel confident if someone who has worked with Lionel Messi and all the others believes in you. That was the week before my first goal and since then I believe I have been playing with more freedom.”

Arsenal will not need any reminding of that. Sané scored another goal against them at the Emirates at the start of this month and is now looking to make it three out of three on his first visit to Wembley. City seem to perform better on bigger pitches and with Guardiola dropping hints that Jesus could be close to a return Sané is hoping his first season in England might end with a final. “With the fans split into two sections, I’ve been told it is an amazing feeling if you score at your own end,” he says. “Most of the City players have been there already but I am very excited about playing at Wembley.”