Bundesliga

DFB-Pokal First Round Draw

Jan — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 19:47:27 +0000

It’s time to brush up on your knowledge of provincial Germany and long forgotten club name prefixes. The draw for the first round of next season’s DFB-Pokal took place today.

Personal Picks of the Round:
Kickers Offenbach - Eintracht Frankfurt (Fierce Derby, Arch Rivals = Fun and Violence - not that the two should go together and hopefully it’ll be mostly peaceful)
Fortuna Düsseldorf - Hamburger SV (sure to become a 51500 sell out)
Union Berlin - Werder Bremen (Union’s fan renovated Old Forestry stadium deserved no less than the title holder for it’s first official match)

Everybody else
Germania Windeck - Schalke 04
Concordia Hamburg - TuS Koblenz
Sportfreunde Lotte - VfL Bochum
Tennis Borussia Berlin - Karlsruher SC
Dynamo Dresden - 1. FC Nürnberg
SG Sonnenhof Großaspach - VfB Stuttgart
Torgelower SV Greif - Alemannia Aachen
SpVgg Unterhaching - Arminia Bielefeld
SpVgg Weiden - Borussia Dortmund
SpVgg Neckarelz - Bayern Munich
Eintracht Braunschweig - 1. FC Kaiserslautern
Eintracht Trier - Hannover 96
FC Ingolstadt 04 - FC Augsburg
FC Oberneuland Bremen - TSG Hoffenheim
FC Villingen - FC St. Pauli
FC Magdeburg - Energie Cottbus
SV Babelsberg 03 - Bayer Leverkusen
SV Elversberg - SC Freiburg
VfB Lübeck - FSV Mainz 05
VfB Speldorf - Rot-Weiß Oberhausen
Rot-Weiß Erfurt - MSV Duisburg
SC Paderborn - 1860 Munich
VfL Osnabrück - Hansa Rostock
FSV Frankfurt - Borussia Mönchengladbach
Wehen Wiesbaden - VfL Wolfsburg
Wormatia Worms - SpVgg Greuther Fürth
Wacker Burghausen - Rot Weiss Ahlen
Kickers Emden - 1. FC Köln
Preußen Münster - Hertha Berlin

Successful, Athletic, Wealthy Lone Wolf Seeks Educated, Intelligent, Fun Loving Blogger for Long Term Relationship

Jan — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:11:36 +0000

In other words: our Wolfsburg Offside is looking for someone to take over and join our lively Bundesliga family here at The Offside.

Please send your fake takeover applications to admin@nufc.co.uk and the real ones to daryl[at]theoffside[dot]com.

Update: Just as I write this post the Borussia Dortmund Offside goes up for auction as well. If you are more the romantic type who can do without the successful and without the wealthy then this is a blog for you.

Update 2: I should have taken a little look around before writing this as there are even more team blogs available: Leverkusen Offside, Muklenblacklen Offside and Eintracht Frankfurt Offside. Blog for two of them and we’ll give you the third one for free.

Update 3: I think I see the pattern emerging, so it’s easier to just say that the Hamburg Offside, Cologne Offside, Bayern Offside, Bochum Offside, St. Pauli Offside and Hertha Offside are the only team blogs currently not looking for a new blogger.

Özil and Marin Give Bremen Fans a Taste of What’s to Come

Jan — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:00:59 +0000

On the left: Werder Bremen’s youngster and designated Diego replacement Mesut Özil.
On the right: Mönchengladbach’s youngster and designated new Werder Bremen signing Marko Marin.
In the middle: a ball, put there for a free kick to Germany’s U21 at the Euros in Sweden.

Three ingredients to make something special happen are in place…

…and something special happened.

Photo: The Last Supper

Jan — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:38:15 +0000

From left to right: Mesut Özil, Per Mertesacker, Claudio Pizarro, Tim Wiese, Torsten Frings et al celebrate their DFB-Pokal victory over Bayer Leverkusen on Saturday (1-0).

Photo: Martin Rose/Bongarts/Getty Images

Bundesliga Season Finale Liveblog

Jan — Sat, 23 May 2009 08:01:00 +0000

What good is a liveblog in a tape-delayed world? I have no idea. I’ll leave this philosophical question unanswered and let our American readers deal with it.

For everyone else it’s season 46 episode 34 of the Bundesliga. We’ve already been served 2970 minutes high on excitement and low on answers - the latter will have to be packed into the upcoming 90 minutes. Who’s going to win the title, who will qualify for the Champions and Europa League, who is going down, what is the smoke monster and what lies behind Felix Magath’s wry smile? The league’s script writers have promised us answers to at least half of these questions.

The Bundesliga Season Finale

Foreigners: Who They Are and Where They Come From

Jan — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:44:58 +0000

Foreigners play for Arsenal London or Inter Milan. Foreigners made England’s footballers so bad, that they couldn’t qualify for Euro 2008. Foreigners now make England’s footballers so good, that they will easily qualify for the World Cup in 2010.

The Bundesliga currently employs 497 players, of which 260 players are foreigners (52,3%). That’s the fourth highest percentage in Europe, only topped by the Swiss Super League (52,9%), the Portuguese SuperLiga (53,8%) and the English Premier League (62,3%). To complete the numbers: Serie A (39,7%), Ligue 1 (38,6%) and Primera Division (36,8%). The latter three leagues still have limitations regarding the number of non-EU players allowed, which to a degree explains the relatively low percentages compared to the Bundesliga and Premier League. So far so good.

But where do they come from? I dug into the extensive player database of transfermarkt.de to find out. I focused most of my attention on the Bundesliga of course and since the transfer window is about to open again soon, all of these numbers will be terribly outdated in just a couple of months.

Note: In cases of dual citizenship, only the first nationality is considered.

1. Brazil (35 players)
2. Croatia (12 players)
3. Serbia (11 players)
4. France, Switzerland and Czech Republic (10 players)
5. Netherlands, Turkey, Bosnia & Herzegovina (9 players)
6. Poland (7 players)
7. Portugal, Austria, Romania, Cameroon (6 players)
8. Denmark, Italy, Cote d`Ivoir, Greece, USA (5 players)
9. Canada, Japan, Sweden, Peru, Hungary, Argentina, Ghana, Bulgaria (4 players)
10. Finland, Belgium, Slovakia, Albania, Georgia, Nigeria (3 players)

Brazil are the world’s biggest exporter of football players and the Bundesliga is one of their best customers - the fourth best to be precise. The clear number one is unsurprisingly the Portuguese SuperLiga (131), followed by Italy’s Serie A (41) and the Turkish SüperLig (37). To fill in the rest of Europe’s Big 5: Ligue 1 and La Liga (26), Premier League (20). Croatia leads the way of ex-Yugoslavian countries, who if involuntarily reunited, could challenge Brazil for the top spot in this ranking. Players from the Balkans are certainly all the rage among Bundesliga scouts at the moment. Another clear pattern seems to be, that all of Germany’s neighboring countries have a relatively high amount of players plying their trade in the Bundesliga. If it wasn’t for Norway’s Tippeligaen (6), the Bundesliga and Premier League would be the joint top destination of American players. I developed a theory about the connection between major US, British or NATO military bases in Germany and the clubs US players tend to join but had no time to follow it through. I got as far as: Mönchengladbach / Joint Headquarters (British Army/NATO) and Kaiserslautern / Ramstein Air Base (US Army). Cameroon lead the Bundesliga’s African delegation. The country was one of the few short lived German colonies prior to the first World War, but I would presume that has no impact on todays player transfers. Having five Italian players playing in the Bundesliga is a quite new development. I think when Luca Toni arrived, he was the first Italian player to join the Bundesliga in about half a century. The Bundesliga is currently the top destination for Japanese players, also thanks to VfL Wolfsburg who have recently signed two Japanese players and are hot on the heels of Kaisuke Honda to make it three. The signings seem to be independent from a possible soft spot for Japanese players by Felix Magath though, as he is probably already working on Schalke’s summer transfer strategy. It could have something to do with Volkswagen trying to better position itself on the Japanese market? To say the Bundesliga is the top destination for Turkish players is more or less correct as well - less because most of the players didn’t have to move to Germany, as they were born there in the first place.

A Get-Rich-Quick Scheme for Football Fans

Jan — Thu, 21 May 2009 23:56:45 +0000

1. Get a piece of paper.

It doesn’t have to be white. Just make sure it fits the color-scheme of your football club of choice.

2. Use the paper to take part in a pre-match fan choreograpgy.

3. Wad the paper into a paper ball and throw it onto the pitch.

4. Let the football gods work their magic.

5. Retrieve the paper ball and put it on eBay.
Rebranding it as “Paper Ball of God” is optional.

6. Earn 4510 Euros.

Quote of the Day: Klinsmann’s Confidence

Jan — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:14:58 +0000

That was actually the most painful thing in the matter, that you had the feeling you would have been able to finish this job. I would have been able to lead the team to the championship.

Jürgen Klinsmann in an interview on German TV.

Should Bayern fail to win the title on Saturday, Jupp Heynckes will have a lot of explaining to do then, I guess. Too bad for Klinsmann that he wasn’t sacked prior to the Barcelona game, because then he could have also claimed, that he would have been able to win the Champions League.

Name the Ringtone

Jan — Wed, 20 May 2009 23:12:43 +0000

Bremen’s sporting director Klaus Allofs needs some cheering up at the moment and would like to put that ringtone on his cell. What’s the name of the song?

Also, any need to discuss tonight’s UEFA Cup final?

Philipp Lahm Takes a Cue From the Animal Kingdom

Jan — Wed, 20 May 2009 16:00:35 +0000

Surrounded by Bayern players chained together for reasons only known to Jupp Heynckes, Philipp Lahm does the smart thing and pretends to be dead until the predators lose interest in their prey, then he quickly gets up and escapes. Stuttgart defenders take note.

The whole training session can be seen here.

P.S.: And since there is the UEFA Cup final taking place today and since I have no post of my own to cover and celebrate it, here are some UEFA Cup final related links instead:

- Chris assesses the final for The Offside…
- … and Daryl asks for mercy for Diego (and Dani Alves and…).
- Dan assesses the final for the revived UEFA Cup Offside.
- And Soccerlens will liveblog the game.

And with all due respect to Soccerlens, but …
>>> THE OFFSIDE UEFA CUP LIVEBLOG <<<
… is the one you should check out, if you have only time to read one liveblog.