Anyone who hasn’t quite understood why national coach Julian Nagelsmann nominated Assan Ouédraogo for the World Cup has now found out: the Leipzig player represents the freestyle element – and brings a lot of other qualities to the DFB team.
One of these qualities, perhaps the most prominent, is speed. Ouédraogo, who trained at FC Schalke for ten years, has a tremendous start in the first few meters. He’s someone you can send really well. His circulation also accelerated extremely when Nagelsmann called him on vacation in Marbella and gave him the place of the injured Lennart Karl.
“I was just lying on a lounger and was so incredibly chilling with my boys.”Ouédraogo describes the seconds when he suddenly had the national coach on his cell phone. “Then the call came. Then it went straight from zero to 180. I ran around the corner so that no one could hear me. Then he told me that he would like to nominate me. I was immediately incredibly happy. Then he asked me if I was drunk. But I don’t drink either way, everything is fine.”
Not mom, not dad, but the big sister
Almost everything. After the phone call with Nagelsmann, Ouédraogo wanted to inform his mother first, but she didn’t answer. Papa Alassane, a former Burkina Faso international, was his second attempt, but it didn’t work either. “I first reached out to my big sister. But she didn’t believe me at first.”
The sister was like many experts and amateur national trainers in Germany. Anyone would have understood a nomination for Cologne’s Said El Mala with 13 goals this season and five assists, and Stuttgart’s Chris Führich also played well in the second half of the season. But Ouédraogo? He scored exactly one Bundesliga goal in 2026, which was the consolation goal in Leipzig’s 4-1 defeat in Freiburg on matchday 34. Templates? No.
Make the best impression
But that was also due to his huge bad luck with injuries. The offensive all-rounder was missing from the 12th to the 16th matchday due to a tendon injury in the back of his knee. He returned in the first leg against Freiburg on January 14th – and immediately injured himself again. This time the break lasted even longer, almost two and a half months. “I was really down then, that was even harder for me than the first injury,” Ouédraogo says now. At this point, the national team was no longer an option. He made a great debut in the 6-0 World Cup qualifier against Slovakia in Leipzig in November and scored immediately after coming on.
His RB colleague David Raum enthuses: “Assan gives us a lot, off the pitch and on the pitch. He is a well-behaved boy who knows how to get involved in a group. But he can also hurt in the game.”
Nagelsmann has now remembered the Slovakia game. He justified the fact that he didn’t bring in El Mala or Führich, but rather Ouédraogo: “We really wanted to take a young player with us and we chose the one who, along with Lenny, made the best impression on us.”
Lenny is Lennart Karl, who is out with a torn muscle bundle. Ouédraogo feels for his injured colleague, but there was no direct exchange: “To be honest, we’ve never crossed paths before. We don’t really know each other. The one time he was with the U21s, I wasn’t there. And when I was there, he wasn’t there. Then he was here in the national team, and I wasn’t there.”
The time with Karl will come
And now Ouédraogo is there, but Karl isn’t. But if the development of the two top talents continues like this and their bodies cooperate, there will almost certainly be many more appearances together after the World Cup. He explains what the Leipzig player can give the team now: “My strengths are dribbling and speed. I would describe myself as unpredictable. Just a bit of freestyle.”