Football – Mainz 05: The secret team of the year

When Germany’s Sportsman of the Year was recently announced in the feudal Kurhaus in Baden-Baden, Bayer Leverkusen finally came second again, this time in the “Team of the Year” category. Sporting director Simon Rolfes naturally took it all in stride last Sunday because he fully recognized the performance of the 3×3 basketball players who won gold at the Olympics. It would have been worse if a fellow Bundesliga player had received this award. FSV Mainz 05 would also have been a contender, at least the secret “team of the year”.

Still doomed at the beginning of the year, the Rheinhessen are sniffing out the European Cup places before leaving. If the last coup succeeds at the visibly tired neighbor Eintracht Frankfurt (Saturday 3.30 p.m.), the zero-fives would be within two measly points of their big neighbor from the banking city. Considering the economic possibilities, this is a sensation: Frankfurt recently reported sales of 363 million euros, while Mainz had 122 million euros.

“Eintracht is a completely different world,” Mainz board member Christian Heidel just told the “Frankfurter Rundschau”. Frankfurt is not a surprise team either. “When you looked at the squad, it was clear to me that Eintracht were at the top.” The 61-year-old admitted that Mainz was doing so well. They “didn’t quite expect it.”

“From Zero to Hero,” as the German singer Sarah Connor once sang: When the pale emergency solution Jan Siewert had to leave in February after a defeat at VfB Stuttgart, the Zero Fives had just won one of 21 games in the upper house. The gap to the rescue bank was nine points.

Heidel, “a real Meenzer boy,” as they say in the Rhineland-Palatinate state capital, followed a good tradition, so to speak, when he swapped coaches in the foolish days. As is well known, Jürgen Klopp was promoted on Shrove Monday in 2001, and Martin Schmidt took over at the climax of 2015. This time the creators conjured up another surprise for the self-proclaimed carnival club: Bo Henriksen, who had done a remarkable job at FC Zurich but who no one had on the list, came to Bruchweg – as the third Dane after Kasper Hjulmand and Bo Svensson.

A positively crazy person, as the Bundesliga would soon discover. How the whipper gets the fans in the mood long before kick-off with clenched fists and flowing mane has long been legend. The 49-year-old was only supposed to lose two games in the second half of the season – in Munich and Leverkusen. Then three top performers, Brajan Gruda, Leandro Barreiro and Sepp van den Berg, left in the summer. Above all, the move of the homegrown Gruda to Brighton & Hove Albion hurt, but with a transfer fee of more than 30 million euros, a medium-sized club that relies on transfer proceeds couldn’t say no.

“After that, we had to assume that it would take some time until we got back on track,” said Heidel. When the first voices arose that the motivational artist Henriksen might have worn himself out, the opposite happened: everyone in Mainz, including the coach, defied the talk. After 27 matches, Henriksen now has a better points average (1.67) than Thomas Tuchel (1.41), Bo Svensson (1.3) and icon Klopp (1.13). His ensemble went under the radar in the fall.

Led by midfielder Nadiem Amiri, outstanding in combat and play and with all his heart, the team has improved on many levels. As in the deserved home win against FC Bayern (2-1), the team can stand low and press high; Engage the opponent in what feels like 1000 duels and still handle the ball properly.

Many veterans have reinvented themselves: goalkeeper Robin Zentner hardly makes any mistakes at the age of 30, the identification figure Stefan Bell is once again a regular player and a source of calm in the Mainz defense at 33, and Jonathan Burkhardt, who has been missing for a long time due to a thigh injury, is the best German with 18 goals Top scorers this calendar year.

Looking back, it’s only understandable that new arrivals like the Japanese Kaishu Sano and Paul Nebel, who returned from Karlsruher SC after a loan, needed a little time to turn out to be an enriching factor. All in all, a lot comes together that explains the Mainz snapshot. The club only has one problem: it always takes a long time for football Germany to really register the good things this location is doing.