The Last Number Ten — How Football Erased Mesut Özil

May 13, 2018. A hotel suite in London. Mesut Özil — World Cup winner, Real Madrid icon, the most creative midfielder of his generation — posed for a photograph that would end his international career. This Mesut Özil documentary traces the full arc of football's last great classical number ten. From Gelsenkirchen to the Bernabéu, from 28 assists in a single La Liga season to 146 chances created in the Premier League, from the 2014 World Cup to the photograph that made him untouchable. It explores the extinction of the number ten role in modern football, the racism that drove Özil out of the German national team at 29, and the institutional silence that saw Arsenal pay him £350,000 a week to disappear. This is not the story of a player who declined. It is the story of a sport that decided it no longer had room for artists.