Every so often football throws up a story that rekindles the sense of romance in all football fans, in England we currently have Hull City, in France Le Mans are in third place in Ligue 1, three years ago Chievo Verona stunned Serie A and in Spain in the past Deportivo La Coruna and Villarreal (still challenging) have tried to break into the higher echelons of their respective leagues. This weekend Hoffenheim beat Hamburg 3-0 at home and went top of the Bundesliga. You could be forgiven for saying who?
TSG 1899 Hoffenheim, to give them their full title, have risen eight, yes eight, divisions in the eighteen years since a certain Dietmar Hopp returned to the club of his youth. Hopp is a man on a mission, he played football as a youth team player with Hoffenheim back in the 1950's and having failed to make the grade as a professional he concentrated all his efforts on business. He was one of the founders, along with four other former employees of IBM, of SAP AG, a computer software company who are the largest software solution providers in Europe and the fourth largest organisation of its kind in the world. Hopp is now in the top 700 richest people in the world (he's actually 698th) and the street in Mannheim where the company are located had its name changed n honour of him to Dietmar-Hopp-Allee. So what does this have to do with football?
Well Hopp never lost his love of his local club and took control back in 1990. His vow was that the club should rise from provincial obscurity to the pinnacle of German club football and then enter European competitions to pit their wits against the great and the good. He has personally paid forty million euros to have a new stadium built for the club and has financed the buying of players from around Europe to pursue his dream of top grade football. What is interesting about the new stadium is that it holds 30,000 in a town, Sinsheim, that only has a population of 35,000. Sinsheim is however situated in the Rhein-Neckar region and has excellent road connections with larger towns such as Mannheim, Stuttgart and Frankfurt. The new stadium will be open for business next year, until then they are playing their home games in Mannheim.
The current first team squad of twenty five has only twelve German born players, the rest of the squad are Brazillians, Senagalese, Austrian born Turks and the odd Spaniard, Hungarian and Italian born players.
The official website of the club is here
3 comments:
I've heard of SAP but never Hoffenheim. Herr Hopp has certainly done an amazing job, hasn't he?
Eight divisions? I wonder what the English equivalent of that would be? My guess is that it would be something like going from the Ryman League to beating Liverpool to go top in the same time span. Wow!
The eighth level in English football is the tier below the Ryman Premier League - it's the Division One of the Northen Premier League (Unibond) British Gas Business League (Southern League Division One) and Ryman League (Division One) - these divisions are further divided into North and South leagues. They are three tiers below the Conference!
Brilliant...nice story and good luck to 'em!
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