Belgium national football team player Axel Witsel aims to win as many titles as possible before retiring. Earlier the Borussia Dortmund midfielder played for Standard Liege in Belgium, Benfica in Portugal, and Zenit St Petersburg in Russia, winning 10 domestic trophies over a 10-year period. From there, he entered into a lucrative contract in China with Tianjin Quanjian, later renamed Tianjin Tianhai – a move that required him to maintain his international caliber while playing at a level lower than usual in Europe. Axel Witsel, who will turn 33 soon, revealed his reason to join the German club Dortmund.
“When I go to China you can say, ‘Okay, I have my money and I’m relaxed and I have no purpose.’ Or stay in shape [and] you work harder after training, so That’s what I did,” says Witsel. “I don’t need to hide why I was in China, everyone knows why I was there. But then, in each training session, I trained individually because I wanted to be in the national team, to be competitive, to play in the [2018] World Cup. And I did very well… it’s not impossible to go to a weak championship to stay in the national team and play a big tournament.”
Witsel added as he revealed the reason to join Dortmund, “A lot of players when they go to [China] … I would not say that as they are on vacation, they no longer have a purpose or purpose. I played there for a year and a half. But in my mind, I wanted to return to Europe to play at a higher level. So, after 2018, after the World Cup, I decided to join Dortmund.”
At Dortmund, Vitsel is an experienced boss at one of Europe’s youngest and most interesting teams. Part of the club’s strategy is to develop the best young players in the world before selling them off for high transfer fees. Witsel has been instrumental in his club’s national campaign, playing in every Bundesliga match this season and being the player with the best passing accuracy in the league.
