Anyone who has played football a little longer in their life, whether in the seventies, eighties, nineties or noughties, has, to be honest, dreamed of becoming a professional for at least one afternoon.

Netzer, Zidane or Messi, the home club's goalscorer, the keeper who wrested a 0-0 win from Bayern would have been enough.

It is a typical dream of a boy and a youth, because the professional footballer has become a “longing figure”, as rock stars used to be or influencers today, writes Ronald Reng in his new book “The Big Dream”.

Peter Körte

Editor in the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

Not only dreamed, but persistently pursued their dream in Germany in the last ten years 26,000 young people in 57 youth training centers.

Five percent of them have made the leap into paid football - in other professional fields one would hardly be satisfied with such a quota, because it looks like a blatant disproportion between training and needs.

But the lucky five percent from earlier years also include the 2014 world champions as children of these high-performance centers.

And when someone like Robin Gosens makes it into the national team without a performance center, he is now admired like a medium miracle.

But what about the 95 percent?

With their hopes, wishes and disappointments?

How does it feel to have spent a youth under the sign of football and then to see the dream burst?

How is it for the families who have shared this dream many times and directed family life around it?

It is a nice coincidence that two long-term observations are currently dealing with these questions: the book by Ronald Reng and a documentary by Christoph Hübner and Gabriele Voss.

Three guys with good chances

Reng's book has the subtitle "Three boys want to go to the Bundesliga". It follows the path of the three between 2013 and 2021. The film “Nachspiel” concludes a trilogy that began in the then successful Dortmund A-youth at the end of the nineties. In 2003, Hübner / Voss brought their first film to the cinema about a couple of the boys, “The Champions”, followed by “Halftime” in 2010. And while the first film had the subtitle “The dream of football”, the second was about the path “From dream to life”. Now, in 2021, it's about life after football.

Reng came across his subject by chance. After a reading, the mother of the professional Markus Steinhöfer spoke to him. She had founded a small agency in Franconia and looked after three boys, then 17 and 18 years old, who covered long distances from their hometowns to the training centers in Nuremberg and Fürth. "When I finally got to know Niko, Marius and Foti, all three had a good chance of becoming professionals," remembers Reng.

Reng tells how you know it from him, lively and rousing, he immerses himself in the respective worlds of life, learns of his first friends and injuries, of trainers who humiliate and those who build up. Foti has more to struggle with the severity of the Bavarian football high school than with opposing defenders. After a hard-fought secondary school diploma, Marius will quit the bank apprenticeship. Niko will disappoint his father, who is a tiler, if he becomes a tiler himself because he no longer feels like being tortured in the regional league. What he comments with the good slogan that he used to watch soccer players on television, “Today I automatically see how the tiles are laid in every toilet”.

The respective development, it quickly becomes apparent, is not just a question of talent, nor of pure will, many other factors play a role, not least of all, such as on the pitch, timing.

There are early hopes that one clings to for too long, but also late triumphs of biting through against coaches who were already trying to retire you.

Bus driver instead of professional soccer player

Ronald Reng has gained a lot of affection for the young men and over the years also gained their trust, so that they gave him many insights into their lives. There is still contact with Niko and Foti, who will soon be completing his apprenticeship as an insurance salesman. And even to Marius Wolf, the Bundesliga professional who was least likely to do that in 2013. At the age of 26, he has now seen almost more clubs than collected tattoos. His future at BVB is uncertain. But Reng manages that, even in Wolf, whose appearances do not necessarily achieve high levels of sympathy, above all the dreamer who can hardly believe that everything really came true.