Nowadays the 31-year-old plays for Eintracht Frankfurt.
Gotze became one of the brightest young talents in world football after coming through the Dortmund youth ranks and won two Bundesliga titles with his boyhood club.
He left for a three-year spell at Bayern Munich in the summer of 2013 but despite interest from his former Dortmund manager Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool, Gotze opted to return to the Signal Iduna Park in 2016.
After four years at Dortmund, Gotze was on the move again; this time to Dutch side PSV Eindhoven.
Asked to name a mistake in his career, Götze told 'Spielmacher - Der EM Talk von Sebastian Hellmann und 360Media' on Thursday: "Probably the decision to return to Dortmund. I should have made a different decision back then. I had one or two other options and went to see Jürgen [Klopp] in Liverpool.
"It would have been good for me to go abroad after playing for Dortmund and Bayern. What I did then, four years later, was just to find a new setup."
Gotze famously scored the winning goal when Germany beat Argentina to win the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil.