The midfielder Mesut Özil announced on Sunday that he is leaving the German national team, a month and a half after sparking controversy by posing in a photo with Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and criticizing the media and the federation in that controversy.
Özil, 29, who has been a key player in Joachim Löw's team, announced his decision through his Twitter account, hours after also explaining through that medium why he took the controversial photo with the Turkish leader.
He decided to take that photo because, if he had refused, it would have been interpreted as "a lack of respect" towards his "Turkish roots," Özil said, adding that he would "do it again" if faced with that situation.
"For me, taking a photo with President Erdogan has nothing to do with politics or elections, but with respect for the highest office in my family's country," he explains.
The image was interpreted as explicit support for the re-election campaign of the Turkish president, who has a tense relationship with Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The coach, Joachim Löw, decided to keep both him and Gündogan in the national team and Chancellor Merkel herself expressed at one point her wish that the fans would stop booing them when they took to the field.
Özil is considered a key player in the national team and also a symbol of integration in Germany for the largest group of foreign-origin citizens, the German-Turks, who number three and a half million people, half of whom retain their right to vote in Turkey.
The national team manager, Oliver Bierhoff, and the president of the German Football Federation (DFB), Reinhard Grindel, reproached them afterwards for not having explained their actions before the World Cup, a move that was interpreted as a way of blaming them for the elimination.
Özil now explains that he would have taken that photo with any Turkish president regardless of who it was and affirms that he is simply a football player, not a politician.
He also maintains that he and Erdogan only spoke "exclusively about football" and recalls that the only previous time he had met the Turkish president was precisely with Merkel, on the occasion of a match between the German and Turkish national teams.
After these explanations about the photo, a second statement followed, in which the 29-year-old player strongly criticized the media's behavior in the scandal and the lack of support from the DFB.
These statements put an end to the uncertainty about the player's future in the national team, a question that was pending the next call-up by Löw.