On Saturday evening, Miroslav Klose showed quite well how 1. FC Nürnberg feels about coming out of this year, a year after which football Germany is once again proud to be football Germany thanks to the European Championship. Does this also apply, on a small scale, to the club? Or what is the state of the Nuremberg soul at the end of the year?
Klose, 46, is not a native clubber, not a fellow sufferer since day one, but a title collector, the top goalscorer in the German national team. Nobody has scored more goals at World Cups than him. Not Gerd Müller, not Pelé, not Maradona. So Klose came to Franconia as an icon, but his arrival in the summer had nothing to do with a spaceship touching down on a furrowed field. Because Klose, the trained carpenter, managed to be the neighbor next door even when he moved out into the big world.
So Klose traveled widely and still stayed within himself. Despite all the trophies and records, Nuremberg’s coach has nothing cosmopolitan about him, and so on Saturday, when he talked about the 1-0 win against Eintracht Braunschweig, you could also see in yesterday’s great striker how it is today, on a small scale, about the Soul of the FCN is appointed. There was nothing exuberant about Klose’s remarks. That’s generally not his style, and yet his words also expressed a certain broad-shoulderedness, a self-image, because the direction is again in the right direction.
“I’m incredibly happy with the development,” said Klose, “I know where we started. Many players were thrown together and a unity emerged.” Part of the truth, and Klose also said it, is: “More would have been possible.”
Nuremberg goalkeeper Jan Reichert has “mixed emotions” under the Christmas tree
In general, football is a game of hopes and disappointments, but people seem to feel it even more intensely at the club, because no other club can manage to squander a lead of three points and five goals on the last match day and be relegated from the Bundesliga. Anyone who has experienced something like this as a fan looks differently when their team plays.
The fact that Klose wore black on Saturday did not mean that the Nuremberg team should be mourned – on the contrary. There’s something going on at the Valznerweiher again, but the table doesn’t show it yet. After 17 games, the club is eleventh with 22 points, an interim report that could easily contain four to six points more. That’s why he’s now sitting under the Christmas tree “with mixed feelings,” said goalkeeper Jan Reichert after the Braunschweig game, which summed up Nuremberg’s first half of the season well. Half a year in just 90 minutes: started mediocre, then furious and successful – and towards the end there was room for improvement again.
So the game turned into a deduction from the previous club season, after all, the year had started slowly before something clicked and the team almost played into a frenzy. But then the victories didn’t come until the Braunschweig game ended successfully. So: all’s well that ends well? In fact, this young, hopeful team and the forward-looking football they play leaves you wanting more. And that is sometimes more important than the mere result. Football Germany is football Germany again, without being European champions. With a similar feeling, Klose’s team has now released his followers into the Christmas holidays.
And because the Braunschweig game was representative of the season so far, of course only one person was eligible to score the goal of the evening: Stefanos Tzimas, the discovery of the first half of the season, the young Greek, for whom just a few months in Germany were enough to shoot his way into the notebooks of the really big clubs. Bundesliga, Premier League, these are the spheres in which the name Stefanos Tzimas comes up. When Klose was asked about his goalscorer on Saturday, he said: “At the beginning he didn’t believe in himself and his strengths, now he’s been there for six months and is doing great.” Tzimas is therefore a reflection of the entire team which can expect a lot in 2025. So much for the soul of the clubbers.
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