It was during a boozy night in Budapest in 2019 that Robin Gosens and his friends stole a street sign and ended up making international headlines.
German newspaper Bild wrote of the ‘Gosens Gang’, their heist revealed to the world when the player naively posted his loot on his social media account.
‘I had around 20,000 followers, so no big deal I thought,’ protested Gosens, then uncapped and still 12 months away from his first Germany call-up.
Ryan Gosens has been Germany's unexpected star at the Euros, shining in the group stages
The wing-back has started all three group games and scored against Portugal in the 4-1 win
But he was not happy with the coverage, especially when his mother called to give him a ticking off.
‘The Gosens Gang? Hello? Were we jewel thieves or what?’
Two years on, and Gosens is Germany’s diamond in the rough. He now has 345,000 followers and continues to make headlines. Now it is for his raids down Germany’s left flank, rather than those on Hungarian signage.
But the story captures the unpretentious charm of this unconventional new national hero, who scored one and played his part in each of the others during last weekend’s 4-2 win over Portugal.
At 26, Gosens has already written his autobiography — Dreams Are Worthwhile — My Somewhat Different Path to Becoming a Professional Footballer.
Gosens was working in a petrol station at 18 and was a long way behind his now team-mates
The left-wing-back was playing in the sixth tier of German football when he was 18-years-old
The wing-back is not a product of one of Germany’s famed talent factories and is the only member of the current squad never to play in the Bundesliga.
Aged 18 and studying for the equivalent of A-Levels, his main source of income was a job in a petrol station, where he earned £7 an hour. He would spend that cash at weekends in the discos of Emmerich am Rhein, his hometown just three miles from the Dutch border.
Gosens later tried to join the North Rhine-Westphalia police force but was rejected as he has one leg shorter than the other.
He was, at the time, playing sixth-tier football for VFL Rhede, where the average crowd does well to break three figures.
Gosens’ Dutch-born father, Holger, insisted he should not give up on his footballing dream, and he journeyed to Holland in search of his big
