Courtesy of Twitter/Mesut Ozil
Rain Varela
Staff Writer
@rain_varela
Picture this: you are a member of your nation’s football squad. You’ve just won a victory in front of a worldwide audience. What would you do next? Get drunk maybe, party for a week or so?
For Arsenal F.C. midfielder, and member of the World Cup winning German national football team, Mesut Özil, the answer is to donate money to 23 sick children in Brazil so that they can have surgery.
Each German player received more than $400,000 for winning the World Cup. It is this money that Özil decided to give to the children instead.
Initially, he had already paid for the surgeries of 11 children before the World Cup, whether Germany won or not, which means that his act of generosity was not something that came out of a euphoria from victory. But it did inspire him to up the ante.
After his squad’s 1-0 win against Argentina for the final game, he decided to raise the number of kids from to 11 to 23, in order to honor his 23 teammates.
Özil posted his decision on his Facebook page:
Hopefully more athletes will be this generous after a win in the future.
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