When England came calling, there was only one thing Oliver Burke could say. He was preparing to make his debut for Scotland and it was the first he had been told of any interest from the Football Association when he heard, at second hand, there were two nations courting his allegiance.
England’s curiosity was valid – Burke was born in Kirkcaldy but moved to Melton Mowbray with his English mother as an infant – but the horse had bolted and within days he would be appearing for Gordon Strachan’s side towards the end of a 1-0 win over Denmark.
“There was nothing direct but I did hear when I was away with the senior squad for the first time that they didn’t want me to play for Scotland,” Burke says. “I was like: ‘No way!’ I can’t change – who does that? I love playing for Scotland; it’s my country, it’s where I was born, and every time I wear the badge it’s a dream come true – goosebumps. They did try a little cheeky one but it was never going to happen.”
That was in March and it would have taken a lively imagination to envisage sitting with Burke at a gleaming facility in Saxony six months later. A month has passed since the winger’s £13m move from Nottingham Forest to RB Leipzig, a record fee for a Scottish player, and in case his international commitment left any doubt about the courage of his convictions it is fascinating to hear why he chose a seven-year-old club in a provincial German city ahead of significant offers from the Premier League.
“You only can only look at your Chelseas and see the amount of talent they have but they’re all out on loan and not getting used,” Burke says, warming to a theme he touches on throughout the interview. “You don’t feel wanted by a club when you sign for them for however much and all of a sudden you’re there for two training sessions and they’ve just bought someone for double the amount. You’re thinking: ‘Why would they play me when they’ve just bought this guy that plays in my position, is more experienced, and has a higher profile?’ For me, it was a no-brainer really.”
The thought process rarely seems to run that way but Burke, who will be 20 in April, stresses the extra “love and care” expended in persuading him to join a club whose name elicited blank responses from friends when he broke the news. “It was everything I’ve been looking for … I looked at it and smiled,” he says of the vision laid out before him on the plane that took him to Germany within hours of his final game for Forest on 27 August. Leipzig had met the asking price but Tottenham also had permission to speak with Burke and Manchester United were among others paying close attention. Ralph Hasenhüttl, the Leipzig manager, and their sporting director Ralf Rangnick got to Nottingham first and their in-flight presentation persuaded Burke there was no need to look closer to home.
“There wasn’t enough depth from the other clubs in terms of how much they wanted me and whether I was going to play,” Burke says, comparing the packages set out by his Premier League suitors with the precision of the information he was given about his role within the Leipzig team and the facets of his game that needed improvement.
It is quite a repudiation of the accepted career path for an outstanding Championship talent and, perhaps, a light thrown on the presumptuous and materialistic scramble among English clubs to hoard the best young players. The mutual confidence between Burke and Leipzig has been borne out in their first month together. Twenty minutes after making his debut from the bench against Borussia Dortmund, Burke set up Naby Keita for the club’s first Bundesliga victory. Two weeks later he scored in a draw with Cologne and settling in has been swift for a player who, the day before completing his transfer, was beating two players to score against Leeds United with his last contribution for Forest.
“When I’m playing football I’m switched off to everything else – it frees my mind,” Burke says. “But I was definitely a little bit emotional, because I’d been at Forest all my life and knew it was coming to the stage where there was a lot of interest and something was bound to happen. I knew I’d be heading to Germany to visit Leipzig and I couldn’t turn it down.”
Burke had been with Forest since 2005, making his debut in September 2014 and being eased into the first team last season before an explosive start to this year under Philippe Montanier, scoring four times and standing out through his pace, power and physique in an entertaining but callow side. The friendships were firm and the happy memories many but the manner of the departure felt somewhat transactional and it is clear Burke feels things could have ended with a lighter touch.
“To be honest, I didn’t feel they really wanted to keep me,” he says. “I didn’t feel I was the main priority to be kept. I feel they were very happy to take the money and let me go. A lot of people are saying my agent [Craig Mather] forced the deal for the money but it was never forced. It just happened because Forest had accepted everything that came at them, even from other clubs. For my part, I knew it was the right time to leave if that’s what was happening.
“I thought they could have at least pulled me aside and said: ‘Look, this is going on,’ and had a bit of a chat. I didn’t know a lot of it and in a way the less I knew the better so that I could concentrate on my football. What we did know was they were accepting anything over a certain amount. In the end, making the decision was not difficult.”
The rights or wrongs of Forest’s conduct are a question for their owner, Fawaz al-Hasawi, who spent much of the summer attempting to sell the club to the Greek businessman Evangelos Marinakis. Burke has swapped that environment for one whose management is markedly more secure, even if Leipzig have been Germany’s most contentious football case for several years. Their rise through the leagues, fuelled by the backing of Red Bull, has drawn plenty of opposition and the 15-minute delay to the match in Cologne, caused when 100 home fans blocked the arrival of the Leipzig team bus, suggests the issue will not fade away. The club points to its hugely successful awakening of the football community in a city that once hosted regular European football with Lokomotive Leipzig and to a youthful, forward-thinking attitude that has translated into an unbeaten first half-dozen games in the top flight.
“I turned up for training on my first day and thought these guys looked like the Forest Under-16s,” Burke says of a first-team squad whose average age is 23 and a half. “Then we started playing and it was like ‘maybe not’. The quality is really good; everybody is technically excellent, because in the Bundesliga you have to be.”
Burke holds his own on that front. The sharpness of those exchanges in training suits him but what really marks him out, and what set the Leipzig hierarchy in such hot pursuit, is the rare athleticism with which those Championship defences struggled in the season’s early weeks.
At the age of 13, Burke could run 100 metres in 11 seconds. He has certainly not slowed up despite knee problems earlier in his teens that almost led to his release from Forest and, while he is yet to time himself on the 50m track beneath Leipzig’s training centre, anyone who has seen his 6ft 2in frame slip through the gears can draw their own conclusions.
“I wouldn’t say I’m the chunky lad who just goes barge, barge, barge, but being strong is an advantage,” he says. Rangnick has described him as a “force of nature”; comparisons with Gareth Bale and Cristiano Ronaldo have come from elsewhere although there have been efforts to temper the excitement. After that assist against Dortmund, Hasenhüttl said Burke’s “hard drive with regard to work off the ball is empty” and it is a charge the player does not deny. Much of his training has resembled a crash course in pressing and all parties accept it will take time before he is a regular 90-minute player at the intensity Leipzig demand.
Perhaps these are lessons others may learn abroad. There is too often a sense that, for all their well-trained utterances in favour of the orthodoxy, life as a Premier League star in waiting resembles a treadmill for some of Burke’s age group. His bright, affable mien certainly differs from the guarded, eyes-down rote responses that can characterise his peers and you wonder why, with the right advice and an ounce of curiosity, this should not be a path pursued more often.
“I couldn’t be happier at this moment and don’t regret anything at all,” he says. “I don’t regret not going to the Premier League: that’s there” – he emphasises the latter word strongly – “and all the other teams are there. I believe I’m at the top here, the top league in the world. Why wouldn’t you say this is the Premier League of Germany – if not better?”
Any further thoughts of England, whether at club or international level, would be nothing but a distraction.