The life of Mesut Özil has been defined by separation. It is both his greatest gift and his greatest curse. As a child growing up in the hardscrabble industrial city of Gelsenkirchen in western Germany, he was excluded by several local clubs. As a star player for Germany, Real Madrid and Arsenal, his brilliance has been underpinned by his extrasensory ability to flit into areas of the pitch where he is most distant from opponents, and therefore able to cause maximum damage. Latterly, he has chosen to exile himself from the German national team. In 2016, a picture emerged of Özil making his religious pilgrimage to Mecca. “Even at the world’s most crowded holy site, he’s still managed to find space,” the sportswriter Jonathan Liew