Alexander Scholz was the quintessential aspiring footballer and is, antithetically, the most atypical footballer you\u2019ll ever find.<\/p>\n
Born in Denmark to German parents \u2013 his father Kent was a centre-back for Esbjerg at the time \u2013 he \u201clived to play football growing up\u201d and \u201chad the smell of boots and grass coming out of me when I breathed\u201d. He obsessed over representing designer clubs and parading himself on platforms like the UEFA Champions League and FIFA World Cup\u2122.<\/p>\n
Then, suddenly, he quit the sport to undertake the Camino de Santiago, a Galician pilgrimage to where the remains of \u2018James The Great\u2019 are buried, and hike in the Himalayas. Scholz returned to the sport \u2013 not because he missed it, but because it was his gateway to living overseas, particularly in Asia.<\/p>\n
He has since resisted repeated offers of new boots to continue wearing adidas Copa Mundials, which were first launched in 1979. He\u2019s remained an avid reader. He\u2019s continued to study philosophy. He prefers playing cards to video games. He doesn\u2019t spend his holidays in Cannes, Dubai, Ibiza, the Maldives, Mykonos or New York City, but doing things like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. And when he renewed his FC Midtjylland contract in 2020, he held firm on a clause that, if a team from the Far East came in for him, he\u2019d be allowed to leave.
\nAnd then one did. Despite having just broken into the Denmark squad, and knowing it would likely be detrimental to his chances of future call-ups, he didn\u2019t think twice about signing for Urawa Red Diamonds. He\u2019s since fallen in love with life in Saitama.<\/p>\n
And as a xenophile, he was ecstatic when they upset Al Hilal in the AFC Champions League final in May. It has afforded him the chance to see and revel in Saudi culture. FIFA caught up with Scholz to discuss his excitement over playing in the FIFA Club World Cup\u2122 and a clash of cultures against Leon in the second round.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Alexander Scholz was the quintessential aspiring footballer and is, antithetically, the most atypical footballer you\u2019ll ever find. Born in Denmark to German parents \u2013 his father Kent was a centre-back for Esbjerg at the time \u2013 he \u201clived to play football growing up\u201d and \u201chad the smell of boots and grass coming out of me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":917714,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20966],"tags":[9648,27192],"class_list":["post-917713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fifa-news","tag-fifa","tag-fifa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/917713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=917713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/917713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/917714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=917713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=917713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=917713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}