433: The Home of Football

This story starts in a small cafeteria in the Netherlands on October 6th. The final day of the extended summer transfer window of 2020. On that day Chris Rooijakkers is preparing snacks in his cafeteria, two blocks away from the PSV stadium in the Dutch city of Eindhoven. Chris has short grey hair and has been preparing snacks for decades. It’s dinner time on October 6th, so Chris is quietly frying some fries. When he looks up for a moment, he sees a massive Mercedes SUV parked in the street in front of his cafeteria. Chris is a fanatic PSV Eindhoven fan, so he decides to walk past the car to take a look. You never know, maybe a new PSV player is inside.

Chris sees some men sitting inside the car, but he doesn’t get a clear view. So he asks his thirteen year old daughter Lyndi if she can sneak up to the car and take some pictures. She is nervous, but decides to give it a go. She walks past the car as well, but doesn’t get a clear picture. She decides to give it another try, this time riding her bicycle. When she returns to the cafeteria, she shows her father the pictures she has taken. They can see a person sitting shotgun in the car. They zoom in on his face and can’t believe what they see. Could it be that the man who decided the 2014 World Cup final in Brazil was about to sign for their favourite football team?

This episode of our podcast is about the day Mario Götze shocked the world, by signing a two year deal at PSV Eindhoven as a free agent. Götze could have signed for several top clubs in Italy. Bayern Munich was even trying to get him to come back. And he had some lucrative offers from countries like the United States. But Götze decided to sign for PSV in The Netherlands. We spoke to the PSV fans who first found out this was happening, and Mario Götze himself, to find out how and why he signed for PSV Eindhoven. Host: Sam van Raalte.

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