Das Reboot: How German Soccer Reinvented Itself and Conquered the World PDF

A beautiful story, expertly told." -- Per Mertesacker, Arsenal defender and member of the German national team, winners of the 2014 World Cup I spent the worst day in the history of (post-war) German football with a German ‘comedian’ in a TV studio.

To borrow a phrase from Henning Wehn, one of the few German comedians who doesn’t need  inverted commas around his job description: it wasn’t funny.

DSF, Deutsches Sport Fernsehen, had invited me to their Euro 2004 talk show in an echoey hangar, hidden in an as yet ungentrifi ed section of Lisbon harbour, not far from the spot where Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich had moored his yacht, to talk about the ramifi cations for Sven-Göran Eriksson’s England after their quarter-fi nal exit against the hosts, on penalties, a few nights before. I don’t know why they invited the comedian.

As we were about to go on air news broke that Ottmar Hitzfeld would not be taking over the Germany job.

‘My heart said “yes” but my head won out,’ the former Bayern Munich coach declared from his Swiss holiday resort.

‘I’m currently not in the right physical shape to help the national team until the 2006 World Cup.

My batteries are fl at.’ To call Hitzfeld’s decision a surprise didn’t begin to get close to the cataclysmic eff ect it had on a footballing nation that lay curled up on the fl oor after the second traumatic group stage fi asco in as many European championships.

A bomb going off at the German FA headquarters in Frankfurt couldn’t have created more devastation.

Two dour draws against the Netherlands (1-1) and Latvia (0-0), had been followed by the coup de (dis)grâce at Sporting Lisbon’s Estádio José Alvalade, administered by a Czech Republic B team without any of their big-name players.

Popular Bundestrainer Rudi Völler had resigned the morning after the degrading 2-1 defeat, explaining that the ‘heavy baggage’ of this horror show made it impossible for him to carry on for the next couple of years.