On the 21st floor of a Frankfurt hotel last week, the cream of German football met for two important meetings. At the first, coach Jurgen Klinsmann addressed the 36 candidates to play for the hosts of the next World Cup. “It was about our philosophy,” explained Klinsmann. The second meeting was smaller — just the captain Michael Ballack, Klinsmann, and administrators. That was about money. Every German footballer, it was agreed, will get a £200,000 bonus if they win the 2006 tournament.
To some who attended the philosophy class, it might all still seem a whirl. Young men such as Thomas Hitzlsperger and Robert Huth are being asked to dream of raising the most coveted trophy in football in Berlin next July while they cannot regularly make the first XIs of Aston Villa or Chelsea. Fulham’s Moritz Volz, called up to a Klinsmann squad for the first time last November and on the German coach’s shortlist, was not in Frankfurt preparing for last night’s friendly against Slovenia; he joined the under- 21s against England on Friday. In the Premiership, Volz has spent Fulham’s past three fixtures among the substitutes.
So it is that three members of the Premiership’s marginal cast are close to a place among the chosen of Europe’s most successful World Cup nation. There are two ways to take this: to sneer, and wonder if the res-ources available to Klinsmann are really so thin that he keeps an eye on Fulham and Villa res-erves; or to acknowledge the new head coach’s boldness, that his drive to rejuvenate Germany is not beholden to fame or reputation. Eight months into his first job as a manager, Klinsmann apparently generates enough goodwill for the public to support the bold, fresh outlook, even if, when Hitzlsperger, Huth and Volz first had their names announced as contenders, that same public needed introductions. Some also needed to learn how to spell Per Mertesacker, the Hannover defender, or Patrick Owomoyela of Arminia Bielefeld, other new caps untarnished by the memory of Germany’s first- round exits at both the last European Championships.
Hitzlsperger, Huth and Volz accept they owe a little of their promotion to Klinsmann’s enthusiasm for the Premiership, where he played for Tottenham in the 1990s, and his belief that it has promoted young German talent faster than the Bundesliga might have done. All three left Germany in their teens, unknown except to a few studious scouts. If none has had the impact on English football of Klinsmann himself, or established internationals such as Liverpool’s Dietmar Hamann, they all feel the benefit of having learnt their football beside the best. Huth, from Berlin, was delighted to be training alongside Marcel Desailly soon after he arrived at Chelsea; in Germany juniors and seniors tend to be kept apart.
As an apprentice at Bayern Munich, Hitzlsperger had seen little of Lothar Matthaus or Stefan Effenberg, the totems of the first team, yet at 18 he was part of Aston Villa team talks. As former Bayern youth-team colleague Owen Hargreaves observes: “There is a fantastic youth system, but it’s always difficult to see too many youth players coming in and taking a place when we have established internationals watching from the stands because they aren’t making the squad.”
England international Hargreaves made it to Bayern’s first team, the only one from his year who did; Germany’s Hitzlsperger, 22, moved on, offered a contract by Villa after a short trial. “I wanted to play and pick up different experiences,” he recalls, “and I hadn’t had the chance at Bayern.” He made his debut for Villa at 18, and the next season was loaned out to Chesterfield, a valuable education, Hitzlsperger says, even if he first took it as a slight.
Volz, a full-back, was by then already in London, recruited by an Arsenal looking for an eventual replacement for Lee Dixon. Volz, 22, who joined Fulham in 2003, would never make that vault, though he has no regrets about exchanging a possible career at Schalke 04 for a shot at the Premiership. A loan spell with Wimbledon kept him from turning restless.
“The English system is very flexible like that,” he recalls. No comparable loan system exists in the Bundesliga. “In England, a player who’s not getting his chance in the top division, can get valuable practice lower down. Look at Ashley Cole ’s Arsenal contemporary. He went to Crystal Palace just before he made the jump to the Arsenal first team.” Huth, an imposing centre-half, is the youngest of the trio and probably the one with the best-starred future. He played in a Champions League semi- final last April for Chelsea at 19 and if he finds himself clearly behind Ricardo Carvalho, John Terry and William Gallas in the centre-half hierarchy, he still feels valued. Chelsea are ready to resist interest from a Bayern impressed by Huth’s performances for Germany, and Huth feels he has time on his side: “Every position at Chelsea is filled with a star, and there is big competition. But if I didn’t think I had a chance of breaking through, I wouldn’t be there.”
The trio have all become Anglophiles. Huth and Hitzlsperger often break into English when they talk on the phone, and all three seem to have acquired some of the same traits. When they joined up with Klinsmann’s squad for a friendly against Cameroon in chilly Leipzig in the winter, the Premiership boys were the only players training in shorts rather than tracksuit bottoms.
Recognition is slowly coming, although Hitzlsperger tells of a recent German TV broadcast of a Liverpool-Villa match that focused entirely on Hamann rather than the international on the other team.
Although he admits that at Villa “I am not playing enough games”, and is aware of interest from Stuttgart, Hitzlsperger is closer to a World Cup place than Hamann, who was in Frankfurt last week but missed the cut for the squad to play Slovenia. Arsenal’s Jens Lehmann can expect to be among the goalkeepers at the finals, providing he is playing first-team club football; his rivalry with Bayern’s Oliver Kahn for the position has been one of the touchier subjects during Klinsmann’s management.
Ballack has replaced Kahn as Germany’s captain, and would be one of only two or three certain starters come the World Cup. Up on the 21st floor of their Frankfurt hotel last week, Klinsmann promised hard competition for places, fast, positive football but no miracles.
There was, though, one miracle sitting in the room. Markus Babbel, once of Liverpool and Blackburn Rovers, had been unexpectedly called to the get-together. That is some comeback. Just over three years ago, Babbel was in a wheelchair, suffering the debilitating — and, for 5% of victims, fatal — Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Babbel last played for Germany at Euro 2000. Little over a year later, he began to lose energy alarmingly. At one point he could not walk unaided. He is now in such form for VfB Stuttgart that the coach wanted to renew acquaintance and put him in the World Cup frame. Klinsmann is in the business of revival. Nobody will give his Germany a better lesson in it than Babbel.
