Actually, this story should take place somewhere else. Maybe in Salzburg, on a sparkling, sublime Champions League evening against Inter Milan. Maybe also in Dortmund or Hamburg, on a Bundesliga afternoon in front of thousands of fans. If everything had turned out the way it was supposed to, the story wouldn’t have taken place in Arouca, in the Portuguese province, just under an hour’s drive from Porto, around 15 degrees on a January morning. Bom dia, Nico Mantl.
There are around 2,300 kilometers that separate him, the Munich native and former goalkeeper of SpVgg Unterhaching, from his homeland. However, that is only the distance that can be measured, the distance on the map. In fact, Mantl is much further away from where one would have expected him to be a few years ago. But Mantl has a mission. He is now in Arouca because here, in the middle of nowhere in Portugal, he can fix something that went wrong in Salzburg, on the big stage. “The most important thing for me is that I’m back on the pitch every weekend,” says Mantl. That’s what Arouca offers him: competition, week after week. Like back then, a few years ago in Haching.
Between 2018 and January 2021, Mantl was on the way up. His career only knew one direction: it was going uphill. Mantl was just 19 when Claus Schromm, Haching’s coach at the time, entrusted him with the goalkeeper spot. Mantl looked up to Manuel Neuer and Marc-André ter Stegen; he wanted to make it there, to the top. He was Haching’s support in the third division and did so well that he was soon called up to the German U21 and aroused the interest of RB Salzburg. Austria’s series champion, Champions League, could there have been anything better? Was he perhaps dreaming?
When Mantl left Unterhaching, his career only knew one direction: it was going downhill.
Today Mantl plays for FC Arouca, 15th in the Portuguese first division, and says in a video conversation: “I slipped down for a long time, but now I have held on and am slowly pulling myself back up.”
When Mantl, 24, talks about his career path, about the great hopes he aroused back then in Unterhaching, about the bright future that seemed to lie ahead of him, he is sitting at the kitchen table in his apartment in Vila Nova de Gaia, around fifteen minutes away from Porto center. He lives here. It’s around 40 minutes by car to Arouca, the training ground. Mantl has drawn the curtain behind him, but the sun still comes in. “I don’t want to say that I miss the cold,” says Mantl, “but I’m used to it. And I would like to see a little snow. But I’m in a holiday area.” He’s just not there to go on holiday, on the contrary. In Portugal it’s about getting going again, getting off the hard shoulder, back into the fast lane, back to where he was when he was in Haching.
When Mantl talks about his time in Germany, about city derbies against TSV 1860 Munich, about the basic trust that Schromm and President Manfred Schwabl placed in him, then it becomes clear how much that gave him. “There is no other third league that is as powerful as the German one,” says Mantl. The fact that he proved himself there, at 19, meant something.
He left Unterhaching for a record fee of two million euros, but his career stalled in Salzburg
Back then he was there, what he had already dreamed of when, as a child, he played football with a friend from the neighborhood in a new development in Oberhaching. Mantl’s thoughts are now back on this small green strip next to the road that led through the settlement. “We set up a goal there,” says Mantl. “I had a jersey from Benni Lauth and one from Kiraly because I thought he was so cool in his sweatpants. We put on the jerseys and then recreated the goals from the Bundesliga.”
As a child he was “a blue boy,” says Mantl. But later, when he came to Unterhaching via FC Deisenhofen, he lost his heart to the game association. Making it to the professional level here was a dream – but then he wanted more. And it looked like he could do more too. He left Unterhaching for a record fee of two million euros, but his career stalled in Salzburg. For Mantl, who was supposed to be an exceptional goalkeeper, it was now the exception if he was allowed to be a goalkeeper.
He was first loaned out to Aalborg BK for six months, then, again for six months and back to Denmark, to Viborg FF. Time has brought him forward, Mantl says today. The first time far away from Munich, the first time on his own, that made him mature. He also learned as a goalkeeper. He doesn’t want to call the Danish league “the little brother of the Premier League”, but there is something that connects the two: the physicality of the game, the toughness: “The whistle doesn’t always blow when you take a corner ball and someone jumps into you. You just have to stay stable when you go up so that you don’t fly two meters away.”
The experiences in Aalborg and Viborg are also so valuable because now, in Portugal, something completely different is required. The game is more technical and faster, Mantl is not just a goalkeeper, but an eleventh field player. If you take both together, the physicality in Denmark and the footballing demands in Portugal, Mantl has now become more complete.
He says he imagined his career to be different, but it’s far from over. He can still fix it – and he is determined to do so. He’s taking a detour to achieve this, but nothing has changed about his goal. Nico Mantl wants to go up. About Arouca, the club in the Portuguese province.
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