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A small team in Germany hits the big time

Oct 12 2008 08:53

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Its training ground is flanked by a cowshed and a petrol station; until last season its stadium seated only 6 300; press conferences are held in a metal container; and, until two years ago, it had but a single supporters' club, with a handful of members.

So the rise of a team from the German village of Hoffenheim to the top of the Bundesliga, the country's elite football league, has taken the nation by surprise. Hoffenheim, in the south-western state of Baden-Württemberg, population 3 200, is the smallest town to have had a team make it to the Bundesliga.

Since the early Nineties the club has risen at astonishing speed through the eight tiers that make up the German football league. It remained in the second division for a single season before going up to join the elite in May. Incredibly, just more than a week ago, Hoffenheim led the Bundesliga, above German giants such as Bayern Munich, Schalke 04 and Werder Bremen before being unseated by Hamburg. If they maintain their early-season form, they will compete in the Champions League next season.

The village is in the middle of what promises to be a season-long party. "I feel like I'm in a film, because everything that's happening seems so hard to believe," said butcher Erwin Hess (41), who occasionally provides the players with their breakfast sausages. "We never thought we'd reach the Bundesliga."

His 75-year-old family business sits amid the ponds, meadows and half-timbered houses that make up the picturesque village that until a few years ago was not even signposted from the main road.

When 1899 Hoffenheim started to get successful, people often mixed the town up with Hockenheim, the nearby motor-racing track. Once they do locate it, visitors find a happy hysteria has taken hold. Bricklayer Heribert Breunig has painted the façade of his redbrick house in the blue and white colours of the club. The Turkish kebab restaurant in the house where club owner Dietmar Hopp was born is festooned with the club's insignia.

Inside the stadium, the atmosphere is unusual, as if locals are unsure how to react to such extraordinary success. This, after all, is not Berlin or Munich. "The mood in the stadium is like the atmosphere on a golf course," said Frank Enzenauer, football reporter for a regional newspaper, Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung. The number of supporters' clubs has risen to about 45. The most distant is in Australia, the most obscure has been formed by a club of academics that compares 1899 Hoffenheim's football style with the works of Immanuel Kant.

Its stunning success is thanks to a rarity in German football -- a rich patron. Hopp has pumped an estimated €120-million into the club over almost two decades. Hoffenheim-born and a former centre-forward in the youth team, Hopp founded software giant SAP and is now one of Germany's richest men.

His involvement has led to charges that the club has had an unfair advantage. 1899 Hoffenheim have been nicknamed Germany's "richest village team". Envious fans of rival clubs express disapproval by singing Dire Straits' Money for Nothing and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on match days. Hopp (68) has received death threats and said he will "only travel to away matches where my safety is guaranteed", and has been disparagingly referred to as Germany's Roman Abramovich.

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It is a comparison Hoffenheim fans say is grossly unfair. Rather than investing in proven superstars, Hopp has been gradually putting the building blocks in place -- bringing in better players, psychology coaches and celebrated coach Ralf Rangnick, who has been with the club since 2006.

"It's Hoffenheim's luck that Hopp was not only born here and played for the club, but he made it his goal to help his hometown," said Thomas Schmitz-Günther, president of Hoffenheim supporters' club Neckertal. "You can't compare him to an oil sheikh or a vain oligarch. He doesn't drive around in a limousine or have bodyguards."

The media-shy mogul has invested €25-million in new players this season -- though there are no real household names -- and the team is the youngest in the league. He is financing the building of a 30 000-seat stadium outside the village, to replace the Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion (meanwhile, the team is playing home games in nearby Mannheim), and has put millions into youth training schemes.

To counter fears about what will happen when their billionaire patron dies, Hopp has drawn up a will ensuring that the club is well looked after, but has said that he hopes it will become self-sustaining before that.

Karlheinz Hess (57), a tobacco farmer, said: "Young players are given priority and, if we continue as we're doing, we'll still be in the Bundesliga in a decade." -- guardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008

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A small team in Germany hits the big time

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