Raphael Honigstein - Das Reboot: How German Football Reinvented Itself and Conquered the World

London: Yellow Jersey, 2016

Why is this book on the bedroom floor?: I’m somewhat of a collector of football books, but only if they give me some insight into the theoretical aspect of the game; the why rather than the what. And what better way to find out how to win stuff than listen to the Germans? And it was a Christmas present from my Amazon list, if any fans of mine are feeling generous.

About the Author: A former law student, Raphael Honigstein moved to London in the early nineteen-nineties. He is the English football correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the German football correspondent for The Guardian and talkSPORT. Most recently, Honigstein has become a major contributor to The Athletic and a regular presence on BT Sport. He is also the author of Englischer Fussball: A German View of Our Beautiful Game. His Twitter handle is @honigstein.

Plot: How does a team win a World Cup, particularly if they are paradoxically a perennial favourite but expected to fail? Das Reboot analyses the key moments in Germany’s winning 2014 run, looking back at the failures of before and how the powers-that-be attempted to solve them to allow a generation packed with talent to leap the final hurdle.

Review: In Autumn 2012, a football team dressed in white conceded four goals to Sweden, including an opportunistic strike in injury time which had reporters scrabbling to reorder their thoughts. This team, thought by some to be a decent shout for the upcoming World Cup Finals in two years’ time, was packed with youthful talent – a new ‘golden generation’ – yet results like this seemed to signal a more accurate truth: a sense of flattering to deceive, a coach retreating into conservatism and a soft middle which would be exposed by better opponents than Sweden in the heat of the Southern Americas.

That team, of course, was England. On the opening night of the Friends Arena in Stockholm, they were taken apart by the indefatigable Zlatan Ibrahimović, who finished off his four-goal rout of the visitors with a gravity-defying bicycle kick. In truth, England were in transition, between a shoulder-shrugging Euro 2012 where they were not expected to, and indeed didn’t, set Europe aflame, (not least because of the short time coach Roy Hodgson had been in the job) and the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Hodgson had the better part of two years to cast younger Premier League stars such as Daniel Sturridge and Raheem Sterling into the mould set by established international players like Steven Gerrard and Wayne Rooney. Losing comprehensively to a mocking Zlatan wasn’t an ideal start.

No doubt Hodgson had run a worried hand through his hair when almost exactly a month before that friendly match, Sweden had come back from four goals down themselves against Germany, sealing the draw in the 93rd minute. It had taken Germany forty-five minutes to race into a 4-0 lead at the Olympiastadion in Berlin, and scarcely longer to surrender it. Germany would go on to win nine out of their ten qualifying games for the World Cup, but all the German press seemed to focus on was that catastrophe in October 2012, for that was likely to set the tone for Brazil – a young team, packed with talent, who could breathlessly take opponents apart but who would certainly wilt when the pressure told.

When it comes to the England men’s football team, the biennial routine for international finals tournaments runs as follows: qualify with barely a scratch; get handed a straightforward group at a glitzy ceremony in the December preceding; say, “well, we won’t win it anyway”; finish the football season and then get unrealistically excited about our chances; draw against A.N. Other in the opening match; go out in the second round; watch some other fans have a party three weeks later. The attitude of fatalism was summed up succinctly by England forward Gary Lineker, who said, “football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for ninety minutes, and at the end, the Germans win.”

It’s a theory that’s difficult to argue against. Germany as a nation have carried off more football World Cups than any other nation barring Brazil and Italy, not to mention the three Henri Delauney trophies as champions of Europe, and their ten major women’s titles. The image of Germany as relentless winners, perhaps with some flair but mainly via strength through organisation, is a persistent one, and while the more investigative football fan will know of names such as Franz Beckenbauer, Günter Netzer, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Matthias Sammer, these are not the players who trip off the tongue when the best players of all time are debated. That field is for the dreamers and magicians: Pelé; Maradona; Cruyff. France had the carré magique, the Magic Square of Platini, Giresse, Tigana and Fernández. West Germany had Gerd Müller, a stocky bloke with gigantic thighs who was fast over a yard and somehow managed better than a goal a game for the national team.

So it would be a surprise to discover that the Germans themselves have generally been less than confident in the run-up to major tournaments about their chances. As an Englishman, this seems incompatible with their success. The last final England reached they won, and have had to dine out on it since, like a plant desperate for water. Germany, by contrast, have reached the last four in 13 of the 19 World Cup tournaments they have contested. Generally speaking, they improve after disappointment too: their triumphs as West Germany in 1974 and 1990 came after two consecutive tournaments as either runners-up or third placers. We should all have such failings.

The view of their football success is tightly wound with Germany’s social and economic success. As the de facto engine of the European Union, the country’s influence on the continent is looked upon with a mixture of envy, fury and wonderment. For certain countries, naming none, it seems markedly unfair that the reason for the destruction of Europe in the twentieth century should be the one navigating its course in the twenty-first. When they are beaten in a final or get kicked out by a minnow nation who don’t have two pfennigs to rub together, such nations laugh, and the Germans wonder why exactly they gave it the word schadenfreude.

Clichés being ignored, the Germans are like any other nation when it comes to football: they hope more than expect. But where we in England hope for it all to be alright on the night, Germany have become accustomed to their opening night reviews being tepid. Thus their approach to tournaments is the opposite to ours – as the first match approaches, expectations lower. When you’ve conquered the world multiple times, it’s hard not to expect the latest iteration to let you down.

On my own travels around World Cup 2006, I witnessed at first hand the swell of a nation being swept towards success, and at the time I wasn’t sure I much liked it. It seemed to confirm all of my prejudices about the German attitude towards sport: that they were arrogant, that they expected to win, and that they had shit taste in music to boot (‘’54, ’74, ’90, 2006’ by Sportfreunde Stiller was a constant soundtrack around the country and a thorn in my side). Not even being in the thick of a penalty shoot-out and seeing how much they too dreaded the bloody things did much to soften it.

By the time the hosts got knocked out in the semi-finals, the country had become swamped by black, red and yellow stripes, in a cacophonous festival of back-slapping and smugness. I attended a large crowd outside of the Hotel Graf Zeppelin in Stuttgart, where the team were staying ahead of the third-place play-off. Danke Jungs fur 4 tolle WM-Wochen – Stuttgart ist stolz auf Euch! (“Thanks guys for 4 great World Cup weeks – Stuttgart is proud of you!”) read the giant banner above us, and everywhere the city rang with the chant Stuttgart ist viel schöner als Berlin, or “Stuttgart is much nicer than Berlin”, to the tune of ‘Yellow Submarine’. A literal stranger in a foreign land, I retired to the central station to smoke, drink lager and wait for my sleeper train.

What I was unaware of at the time was how era-shattering those behaviours were in the German nation. For the obvious reasons, excessive flag-waving has long been frowned upon, as had the kind of frenzied excitement about a team that fell just short of their final goal. To be hacked off about enthusiastic fandom is certainly rich coming from a person who was steeped in memories of Euro ’96, a terrible tournament but one of immense fondness for the average Englishman. It doesn’t take much to recall, either, the sprays of lager and footage of the BBC punditry team grinning from ear to ear above Red Square after reaching the semi finals of Russia 2018.

2006 was Germany’s sporting renaissance, not in the sense of talent finally coming together, but a metaphorical rebirth. It was okay now to support the team. It was fine not to heap pressure on young players. You could belt out the third stanza of the Deutschlandlied without fear of breaking some terrible taboo; even the winners in 1974 stood silent when the anthem was played at their own home tournament.

But even had I realised this, I wouldn’t have realised the importance of the break from the previous tournament, Euro 2004, which has taken on a lightning rod quality as the nadir of post-reunification German football. Previously, Germany sides may have been short on star quality but at least got the job done, whereas by 2004 the term Rumpelfussball had become the preferred way to describe the nationalmannschaft – players lumbered around the pitch, uninspired and tactically clueless. Accordingly, Germany bowed out at the group stages after two draws and a defeat to the Czech Republic B team.

From such a low point, the only way could be up, and this is exactly the story which Das Reboot documents. Its subtitle makes no rash promises and in its own way is subtly humorous: How German Football Reinvented Itself and Conquered The World. Through interviews with the key architects of the journey between 2004 and the subsequent decade, Das Reboot fleshes out what for some might have been a dry tale of tactics and man-management.

Following a loose structure of a chapter of exposition followed by one based around one of the games along the Germans’ 2014 World Cup journey, Honigstein begins in South Tyrol, at the pre-tournament training camp. After a bonding exercise goes wrong, warning signs start cropping up everywhere – key injuries, question marks over the suitability of coach Joachim Löw’s favoured passing strategy in the Brazilian humidity, and a press convinced that the best German squad in a generation’s chance had passed after a meek capitulation in the 2012 European Championship Final.

However, as Honigstein chews the story over with general manager Oliver Bierhoff (well, that and a Fleischpfanzerl, a Bavarian hamburger), it becomes apparent that a little bit of tension paradoxically helped the team relax, removing the stifling boredom of the wait. On the last night, the senior players organised a team sauna, symbolically challenging their colleagues to ‘sweat for the title’, and this is the point at which Bierhoff felt things begin to move forwards. 

Although ordering sixty members of a touring party to strip down to towels in an Alpine lodge doesn’t seem like the kind of action that any kind of glories are made on, Bierhoff reasoned it had two key lessons: realising everybody is in this together, and also to leave pride at the door. German teams of the past had suffered internal splits, with over-reliance on star players, but this sauna, organised as it was from within, helped to empower internal authority and to break down club barriers (particularly between players from the two leading clubs Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, who had finished the season in a feisty Cup Final).

The architect of the revolution has largely been credited as Jurgen Klinsmann, who was wooed after the Euro 2004 humiliation to return from working in the USA. Unwilling to do half a job, Klinsmann insisted on “taking apart the whole shop”, analysing why German football as a whole was falling so rapidly behind. Because of his apart-ness, Klinsmann was able to be more dispassionate than a regular Bundesliga coach, but Honigstein makes clear that Klinsi was criticised for more or less any change he initially made, whether it be tracking fitness stats or gymnastic exercises with no footballs. The man cruelly nicknamed Pin-Ball by his teammates because of his tendency to miscontrol had detractors everywhere. Apart from where it counted: on the pitch, the players he urged to take control of their careers and make it count felt inspired and motivated. 2006 validated his strategy, part of which involved his assistant coach Löw.

Eight years in the top job, Jogi Löw had built on the good work done by Klinsmann by utilising the vast strides taken by Germany’s academy system, which was underfunded before the home World Cup but starting to gather momentum by the next one in South Africa. Honigstein discusses how the change to German society opened up previously-closed frontiers; under former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, citizenships opening up meant players born of immigrant families being lost to other countries could now come of age in the white and black.

Added to this is a large splash of technological trickery, namely the Footbonaut, a room in which random footballs are rolled towards a player and subsequently fired at a target. Reaction times are measured and obviously improved upon. This invention, drafted incidentally on the day of Liverpool’s famous Istanbul comeback, was first installed at Borussia Dortmund under Jurgen Klopp, and used by, among others, Mario Götze. The German players benefited from a brand-new app which could play short clips of any moment in a game, so frailties and strengths could be analysed in detail.

So far, so Ron Manager. Obviously, the more intense your passion for the bones of the game, the more fanboy detail you’re going to relish, but Das Reboot isn’t a straightforward blackboard trek. The strength of this story is its characters, and Honigstein is very smart to bring those people to the forefront. Heroes and villains all get their moment in the spotlight, even if their part in the success is tangential. Current British football darling Klopp, the “Harry Potter” of German football, is critiqued at some depth for his contribution to the kickstart in tactical thinking, as is contemporary Ralf Rangnick. Essentially, fitness and the chase became more important than what one man could do with the ball, and their experiences certainly support Schopenhauer's theory of truth being derided before being accepted as self-evident.

Honigstein leaves very little unturned in his thoroughness, and although almost described in anecdotal detail, small events which turn out to be key moments along the way hold their own alongside performances. The curriculum of academy kids, Paul Breitner shaving his iconic beard for an advert and the Germans growing their own turf in Brazil don’t seem important in isolation, and maybe if the journey didn’t finish in glory they wouldn’t be, but they make this tale far more engaging than it otherwise would be. Football fans love that kind of trivia, always have, particularly if they feel their own team’s success could stand and fall by such butterflies.

But ultimately, it’s down to the men who cross the white line, and aptly for a tournament with such tropical overtones, each member of the German side gets his moment in the sun. The clumsy Thomas Müller, fully aware of his own awkwardness, kicked off scoring proceedings in the opener against Portugal and ended with a hat-trick – not bad for a mere Raumdeuter, or ‘interpreter of space’. While some of the squad are wunderkinds, others, like Miroslav Klose, were discovered pottering around the regional leagues or marking their international call-ups while working in a mental hospital, as did Per Mertesacker. Honigstein makes merry with the idea of paradoxical superstardom – normal young men, whose parents are bank managers, carpenters and sports coaches, buying into a philosophy of teamwork while being some of the most-decorated players in the world.

Perhaps the most interesting player, in the long-term anyway, is the aforementioned Mario Götze, who adorns the cover. It was of course Götze who scored the extra-time goal in the final against Argentina which earned Germany their fourth World Cup title, with an instinctive chest and volley. Götze had been a peripheral figure during the tournament and had struggled with a big-money move from Dortmund to Munich, yet when the opportunity arose in the moment, everything Honigstein has related came together in that one movement – the Footbonaut, the gegenpressing at Borussia, the humility, the academy structure. The author reminds us that Götze was once touted as “the new Messi”, yet the current one carried the burdens of his nation while Götze was largely anonymous until that last second. It’s as if Honigstein has kept his powder dry, his final portrait on this boyish young star occurring almost as if Toni Kroos’ cross is in the air flying towards him.

Das Reboot, for all of its detail, is a book with remarkably little fat. It’s an ideal read for even the average fan, written with humour and an obvious access to its subject. There are no second-hand revelations; Honigstein talks in depth to many, including Klinsmann, Bierhoff, and captain Phillip Lahm. This is the way it was done, warts and all, and it’s an engaging read which doesn’t outstay the party.

But, and here’s the kicker, with the benefit of six years and another World Cup’s hindsight, it’s ironic that Germany defended their title by exiting in the group stages of Russia 2018. It was a miserable tournament for them, and many of their stars didn’t perform. Those that had come in since 2014 didn’t seem up to this particular challenge, whereas for other under-achieving countries (cough, cough), it was a World Cup to live long in the memory.

So I suppose Das Reboot isn’t quite telling the whole truth. Maybe it’s the blueprint to win a particular World Cup, the way to bottle lightning. So, if you’re a coach looking for inspiration, the recommendations are simple – start a decade and a half ago, invest in a million-pound training accessory and millions more in overhauling your school structures, invent an app and hole yourself up in a hotel in the jungle. Oh, and a mass sauna wouldn’t go amiss, but then who’s going to argue with that?

Will I keep this book on the bedroom floor?: I can’t imagine it’s one I’ll read too often, but a good football read is always handy for a palate cleanser. Besides, I also have Englischer Fussball and it’s a shame to break up a good team, even if they have aged.