When Emre Can takes to the field in Saturday night’s Champions League final against Real Madrid at Wembley he’ll be hoping to see a little less immediate action than the last time he was on such a stage.

It was the 83rd minute of the final against the same opponents in Kyiv six years ago when Can, on what everyone knew would be his final appearance for Liverpool, came on for James Milner. Within seconds Gareth Bale had fired a shot from distance that passed through the devastated and dizzy Loris Karius. 3-1 Madrid. Game over.

In 2024 Can, now 30, will lead out a Borussia Dortmund side who’ll know that they’ll need to play the long game if they are to spring a surprise and deny Real a 15th European crown at Wembley. But their skipper knows all about lengthy and rocky paths to success.

Leaving Bayer for Brendan

A Frankfurt native who had come through the ranks in his home town before being gobbled up by Bayern Munich aged 15, Can had been around the Bayern squad which made it to the Wembley Champions League final against Dortmund in 2013, playing seven times that season but never in Europe. He had failed to make the final squad, and after two years in Munich decided to move on to Bayer Leverkusen in search of a game.

The move hadn’t been taken lightly, and two clauses were inserted into the deal. One allowed Bayern to buy Can back for a set fee in 2015, and the other was a more standard release clause of £9.75m which kicked in after his first season. Sure enough after just one year at Leverkusen, where he had featured against Manchester United in the Champions League, Liverpool swooped.

It was a curious time for a 20-year-old to be moving to Anfield. The Reds had just had that giddy 2013-14 title challenging season which promised so much but was ultimately rather built on sand, and the German was seen as a welcome addition to a squad which could do with more midfield options alongside an ageing Steven Gerrard and the uncertain qualities of the likes of Jordan Henderson, Joe Allen and Lucas Leiva.

Can looked good too, with a fine goal against Chelsea as he surged from midfield and fired home on just his fourth start for the club evidence of what he could do, but unfortunately for him this was a Liverpool team that was going rapidly off the rails under Brendan Rodgers.

That Chelsea game was just after the infamous trip to Real Madrid when Rodgers rested Gerrard, Philippe Coutinho and Raheem Sterling in order to protect them for the clash with the Blues, which Liverpool lost. Months later the 2014-15 campaign had long descended into chaos when Can, playing as a right-sided centre-back in a three, was sent off in a 4-1 defeat at Arsenal in April, two weeks before an FA Cup semi-final defeat to Tim Sherwood’s Aston Villa, which in turn was a month before a 6-1 loss at Stoke, Gerrard’s final game but somehow not Rodgers’.

And that is probably the key to assessing Can’s Liverpool career. That delay to sacking Rodgers, who had completely lost the run of things, was in order to allow Jurgen Klopp the brief break he wanted before blowing into Anfield with his winds of change in October 2015.

“That’s football!”

Can’s Liverpool time falls between the messy end to Rodgers and the encouraging start under Klopp, with whom he quickly became a key figure, scoring the Reds’ first goal under his fellow countryman in a 1-1 Europa League draw at home to a 10-man Rubin Kazan.

From there it was obvious that Klopp saw Can as a key player, and while his form fluctuated he still produced some memorable moments including a fine strike from distance to win a game against Burnley and an unfathomable overhead kick winner from the edge of the box at Watford, the Premier League’s Goal of the Season. When Can put the finishing touch to a brilliant team move as Liverpool beat Hoffenheim in a 2017-18 Champions League qualifier Klopp screamed “That’s football!” as he celebrated on the touchline. Can was key to that, but there was an issue.

He had just one year left on his contract at the start of that season, and with an impasse over an apparent desire to insert a release clause in the deal – and at a time when Liverpool were far from certain of being a Champions League club, that was somewhat understandable – Liverpool’s football operations hierarchy, now led by Michael Edwards, stood firm. It was one of the first signs that they were prepared to do things a little differently and didn’t care about making unpopular decisions. Can was by no means a huge fan favourite, but most felt that, at 24 and with his prime surely ahead of him, he was worth a new deal. You sense that Klopp felt the same.

But that Real Madrid cameo was to prove to be his 166th and final Liverpool appearance, joining Juventus on a free transfer. Once there, football very quickly became the last thing on his mind.

Two Juventus phone calls and an Instagram post

Two months after Can completed his medical with the Italian giants the club doctors called him. Routine screenings during the tests had uncovered that he had thyroid cancer.

“I needed to undergo surgery urgently,” Can told DAZN last year. “This has changed a lot in my life. You can have a lot of money, you can have everything, but health is the most important thing. I am so grateful to Juventus doctors. I didn’t even know what a thyroid was and I would never imagine I had cancer. The move to Turin was worthy, only just for this.”

Juve hid the urgent nature of Can’s surgery, but after such a traumatic start at his new club it was little wonder that he had trouble settling in. He still played 29 times in the league to pick up a Serie A winners’ medal – a welcome prize after losing in three cup finals with Liverpool – but his place in the team wasn’t secure. Then when Maurizio Sarri arrived in the summer of 2019 and signed Aaron Ramsey and Adrien Rabiot, he was axed from the Champions League squad.

“Sarri arrived in the summer and hadn’t trained us in the first few weeks because he had pneumonia,” Can would later tell German football magazine Kicker in March 2020, at which point he had joined Dortmund on loan and already agreed to make it a permanent transfer.. “Then, after the club had refused offers for me and taken me off the market, he called me and with a 20-second phone call announced that I wasn’t on the Champions League list.”

Although always respectful of his time in Turin, when Juventus announced the sacking of Sarri on Instagram a day after they lost to Lyon in the last-16 of the Champions League in August 2020 – the second leg taking place six months after the first due to the pandemic – Can made sure to like the post.

Finding a home in Dortmund

Ever since that loan switch Can has been a mainstay in the Dortmund side, operating in either defence or midfield and being a dependable presence in a team which has evolved through Erling Haaland, Jude Bellingham and Jadon Sancho, and at one stage all three such as when they won the German Cup together in 2021.

Marco Reus lifted that trophy as captain, but ahead of this season – and after a stellar couple of years in which he’d forced his way back into the Germany squad and signed a new contract – it was decided that Can should take over the armband from the veteran winger, who will play his final game for Dortmund on Saturday.

Reus is a fine example of a player whose career has had few dramas and little upheaval, other than turning down moves and opportunities when they came along.

Can meanwhile has trodden an altogether more different road to Wembley, and while neither can be considered a better route than the other, few would begrudge the current Dortmund skipper his Real Madrid revenge on Saturday. Whatever happens, he has finally found his home.