For most of last season we heard how Hull was the largest city in Europe never to have tasted top-flight football. Now, of course, they are joint-top of the Barclays Premier League (for the time being at least).

Over in the Bundesliga, 1899 Hoffenheim are also joint-top. And it is a fair bet that, with a population of about 3,000, this borough of Sinsheim, in southwestern Germany, is the smallest town in the top tier of any leading league.

A fairytale? Yes. . . if your definition of fairytale allows for German software moguls who invest some £80 million in their local club. For Hoffenheim’s rise has been facilitated by their sugar daddy, a man named Dietmar Hopp. In 1972 he co-founded a company called SAP AG that went on to become Europe’s biggest computer software producer. Today he has a personal fortune of more than £2 billion and, according to Forbes magazine, he is the 698th richest person in the world. He chose to invest in Hoffenheim in part because, in the 1950s, he played centre forward for their youth side.

And that alone rather sets him apart. If he were just another billionaire looking for a plaything, a publicity vehicle or an “investment” (funded by borrowing huge amounts and then saddling the club with the debt), he could have taken a short cut by putting his money into a Bundesliga club. Instead, he picked the club closest to his heart – even though, at the time, they were in the eighth tier of the German pyramid – and brought them along slowly. It took Hoffenheim 18 years to make it to the big time.

“I am the exact opposite of Roman Abramovich,” he says. “I wanted to build something that would last and, to do that, you have to go slowly.” Indeed, most of his early investment was in youth football. He brought in highly regarded coaches and built a state-of-the-art training ground. When they reached the third tier, he turned to Ralf Rangnick, a big-name manager whose CV includes the likes of Hannover 96, VfB Stuttgart and Schalke 04 (for comparison’s sake, it would be a bit like Glenn Hoddle taking over at Cheltenham Town).

After banking on local players, he turned to foreigners for the final push: Hoffenheim’s squad includes 13 overseas players, although Hopp is proud that the backbone remains German and they have the youngest team in the league. Next year, they will move into the 30,000-seat stadium Hopp built. At the moment, they groundshare with Mannheim.

Not everyone is happy with Hopp’s involvement in the game. He has been accused of buying success and he claims to have been threatened by supporters of Borussia Dortmund (whose club statute and vast membership make them the antithesis of Hoffenheim).

But, thus far, it is hard to see Hopp’s influence as anything but benign. While he has bankrolled the club to a fair degree, he has not gone overboard in terms of wages, opting instead for the “crawl before we walk, walk before we run, run before we fly” philosophy.

He believes that Hoffenheim can be self-sustaining and, given their place in a populous region starved of top-flight football (Karlsruhe, the closest top-flight club, are 40 miles away), he is convinced they have enough of a catchment area to survive. To judge by the 13,200 season tickets sold, he may have a reasonable case.

Of course, there is always the risk, as with any wealthy investor, that he may lose interest or pass away and that without his funding Hoffenheim would tumble back down the football pyramid. But if that were to happen, at least the club will be left with a new stadium and a world-class training ground. Which is far more than the legacy left by others who “have lived the dream”.

As billionaires bankrolling clubs go, Hopp appears a more desirable figure than a number of the folks who have passed the “fit-and-proper test” in the Premier League, let alone in Serie A or La Liga.

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