STARTING OUT

Jürgen Klinsmann WAS an eight-year-old bundle of blond energy when he first put his foot into a soccer ball with a team. It was early in 1973, and like millions of West German boys, he had already been playing soccer with friends in pickup games — kicking balls around in parks, on the streets, or at school during recess. In a soccer nation like West Germany, it's what almost everyone did.

The national sport is everywhere. It's the game children play whenever they get the chance with their friends or family. Soccer is more than just a sport in Germany; it's a way of life. It is a part of the national identity, and it has been a source of intense national pride for more than six decades. Soccer is in many ways a bond that holds the nation — and its generations — together.

As much as eight-year-old Jürgen Klinsmann enjoyed kicking a ball around with friends in his small hometown of Gingen, he had never played soccer on a team — with uniforms, rules, and coaches. With encouragement from his father, he had given gymnastics a try at the club a year earlier. Siegfried Klinsmann, a forty-year-old master baker, had been a gymnast in his youth and was a part-time coach at the local club, the Turnerbund Gingen — TB Gingen. He thought gymnastics might challenge his son and expend some of his abundant energy. So he took Jürgen, the second oldest of his four boys, to the club when he was about seven years old to give gymnastics a try. But the tumbling, vault, and balance beam didn't especially impress Jürgen. There wasn't a lot of action, he recalled. A little while later, a few friends took Jürgen to handball practice, a popular indoor winter sport in pockets of Europe that's a sort of hybrid between soccer and basketball. But that didn't hold much appeal either.

Then in the winter of 1973, a few months after West Germany won the first of its three European Championships in 1972, he joined friends at a youth team soccer practice at TB Gingen. He took an immediate liking to the game in its organized form. He was captivated by the speed, the action, the energy, and especially the rush he got when he managed to score a goal.

"I just loved the feeling of running around, of letting all that energy out on the field, and the great feeling you have afterward," Klinsmann says, recalling his first formal practice sessions. "Soccer was just a wonderful outlet for all that energy that was bottled up inside. I was obsessed about running around and playing ... I could go on playing soccer for hours at a time. I just really enjoyed it and had a lot of fun with it from the start. It gave me such a good feeling."

He signed up with that local amateur soccer club and started wearing TB Gingen's red-and-white jersey. The team was at the very bottom of Germany's soccer hierarchy, or pyramid — the entry level of organized soccer. There would be a direct line of promotion up that broad-based structure in the years that followed for Klinsmann. Thousands of other players his age joined a club in 1973, but only a few would make it all the way to the top of the pyramid: the Bundesliga and even onto the very pinnacle on the Nationalmannschaft. There still isn't such a clearly defined soccer structure in the United States, which Klinsmann has been working to change.

As a child, Klinsmann had no idea how far soccer would take him. He was simply having a great time playing the game, developing his skills with his friends and teammates. His focus at first was on making the starting team at TB Gingen, a club that had been established in 1870 as a gymnastics club. TB Gingen later added handball, track and field, and soccer sections. Long before anyone in Germany had heard of Fussball, the game of soccer that was imported to Germany from England in 1874, the Turnverein, the gymnastics clubs, were part of a popular nationwide nationalist movement in the nineteenth century — and that's why many of the top soccer clubs in the country still have references to Turnen (gymnastics) in their names.

Young Jürgen Klinsmann had a blast playing soccer on a team and felt the rapid improvement of his skills that naturally came along with so many hours of practice both with his club and at home. Unlike in the United States, where sports teams are an integral part of the school system, there are virtually no school sports teams in Germany, so children turn to sports clubs as their outlet for competition. Klinsmann's attachment to soccer can be traced back to his first club in Gingen.

There are many cultural differences small and large between towns in the United States and Germany. One of the most important distinctions is that time and progress are measured in other dimensions in towns like Gingen, a sleepy village of four thousand on the Fils River that was settled more than one thousand years ago. The pace can be glacial, and patience is part of life. When people in towns with a thousand-year history speak of a long-term horizon, they aren't talking about weeks or months. When Jürgen Klinsmann talks about a long-term perspective for soccer in the United States, he has his German roots in the back of his mind and is thinking in terms of many years, decades, and even generations.

TB Gingen's weekend games attracted scores of local townspeople — not only parents and friends but also local citizens eager to watch young children playing the country's most popular game. Klinsmann's father used to come out to the Sportplatz, the soccer field, to watch every game that he could make it to after finishing up for the day at his bakery.

Organized soccer is a serious matter throughout Germany. The German Football Association (FA), or Deutscher Fussball Bund (DFB), is the largest organization of its kind in the world, with 6.9 million members. Klinsmann was one of 112,858 West German children to sign up on a team for the first time in 1973 when he joined TB Gingen. The membership fee was affordable — a few dozen deutsche marks (about $20) per year. The coaches were invariably former players and mostly volunteers — another striking difference between Germany and the United States, where coaches are often paid and don't necessarily have playing experience themselves. Because soccer has always been such an inexpensive sport in Germany, it's been hugely popular with children from all walks of life, especially from families with limited resources. "We all came from families with moderate incomes and fought our way through," Klinsmann says. "Worldwide, soccer is a sport played by kids in the lower- and middle-class environments. In the United States it's different."

There were a total of 98,911 teams at 15,890 clubs in the DFB at the time. The number of players registered on teams with the DFB rose from 3,084,901 in 1972 to 3,197,759 in 1973, the year Klinsmann joined. The DFB doubled in size over the next four decades. To put some perspective on the DFB's size in 2015, it had 6,889,115 members — meaning there were more people playing on registered soccer teams in Germany than the entire population of Denmark, Finland, or Jordan.

Youth soccer ranked high on the sports calendar in countless small and large towns across West Germany, not only offering an outlet for young boys but also serving as an important community social function on weekends — not unlike Little League baseball games or high school football games across the United States that connect sports-minded children with their parents and communities. The number of new soccer players in Germany usually jumps significantly in the years after the country wins a major tournament, all of which are watched on television by virtually the entire nation — with market shares as high as 86 percent of the nation's viewers. The year 1973, one year after West Germany beat the Soviet Union 3–0 in the final to win its first European Championship in the tournament played in Belgium, was no exception. It inspired thousands of youngsters like Klinsmann to sign up with youth teams across the country.

There is no such thing as a "soccer mom" in Germany, and the concept usually needs a lot of explanation for Germans and others around the world. Soccer has widespread appeal across all demographics in Germany and is not by any means limited to stay-at-home mothers in affluent suburbs who shuttle their children around to after-school activities. Germany is also a country in which mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts, and uncles as well as Oma and Opa come out to watch the games and happily drive or accompany their children, siblings, or family members to and from practices and games. Soccer is ubiquitous in Germany, as it is in much of the world, played by all socioeconomic classes.

"You're a child of your environment, and my environment was a little club in my hometown that offered different sports — gymnastics, handball, and soccer," says Klinsmann, who is working to give soccer in the United States a similarly broad-based structure, feeding players through youth leagues to the top of the game. "My family had ties to gymnastics, so that was what you tried first. And then a friend takes you to a handball practice and you try that. And then the next friend takes you to soccer, and there you discover it's the thing you like the most. That's the way it was in West Germany back then. That's the beauty of the system of sports clubs there. You can just try things out to see what feels right. A lot depends on what your best friends are doing as well, and you end up going to the sport where your buddies are playing, and in Germany that's going to be soccer about ninety percent of the time."

Klinsmann was born in the village of Göppingen, near Gingen, on July 30, 1964. That year marked the peak of the baby boom in Germany, a record-breaking year for births: a total of 1,357,304 children were born in West Germany and East Germany. Never before or after were so many Germans born in a single year.

Klinsmann was fascinated by the competitive environment on the TB Gingen youth soccer team and encouraged by his ever-improving skills. Even at the age of eight, he had an abundance of drive and an insatiable appetite to improve. His aim was to be on the field as much as possible, then to become the best player on the field — while winning and scoring as many goals as he could — an ambition that propelled him on and upward over the next quarter century.

Klinsmann generally avoids dwelling on the past. But a smile nevertheless creeps across his face when reminiscing about his fascination with soccer as a youngster. "This little community was just driven by kicking a ball around. So you do that with your buddies in the street, and then you try it out at some point at your community club. That's basically where I started to play. That was pretty much the earliest age when you could play club soccer back then, starting at about eight. Before that there was nothing really organized. That's all changed now. Some kids start playing at clubs even at the age of five!"

Soccer had become an important part of West Germany's national identity a decade before Klinsmann was born — in part a result of the euphoria that erupted when the country won the 1954 World Cup, beating Hungary in the final, and the afterglow of that historic triumph. The West Germany team's unexpected success was a trigger for the country's "economic miracle" and the nation's improbable rise from the ruins of World War II. The powerful influence that soccer holds over the German psyche can be traced back to that epic World Cup victory. Taking the Cup against such long odds contributed to a social, cultural, political, and economic chain reaction that economists said helped spark the legendary economic boom of the 1950s, lifting morale in West Germany after a decade of postwar deprivation and despair. It was the game of soccer, more than anything else, that wrenched the country out of its postwar lethargy. It brightened the national outlook and collectively helped millions of Germans feel they were a part of the world community again after decades of ostracism and isolation because of their destructive Nazi past. Understandably, soccer has been much more than just a game for Germans ever since.

Klinsmann's second birthday, in 1966, could have been a day of joy in West Germany but became a day of mourning instead. The country had been unable to repeat the success of the 1954 World Cup win in 1958 or 1962, and were knocked out in the semifinals by hosts Sweden, 3–1, in 1958, and by Yugoslavia, 1–0, in the quarterfinals in 1962. But in 1966 they were close to winning a second championship in twelve years, reaching the final against hosts England. But they were beaten when England's Geoff Hurst was awarded a controversial goal eleven minutes into the thirty-minute extra time period to make it 3–2. Hurst's shot hit the crossbar, bounced down on, but probably not completely over, the line before being cleared away from the goal by a West German defender. Was it truly a goal or not? It's one of the all-time great controversies of soccer and will likely never be conclusively resolved. England got a fourth goal one minute before the end of play as West Germany pressed forward desperately trying to tie the score again.

There are ordinarily three outcomes for a soccer match: win, loss, or tie. But there are no ties at big tournaments such as the World Cup, so if a game is still even after ninety minutes, the two teams continue on to play two fifteen-minute periods of extra time. If the game is still tied after the thirty minutes of extra time, the penalty shoot-out determines the winner. In what is invariably a high drama one-on-one showdown of kicker versus goalkeeper, the teams take turns taking shots from the penalty mark with the team that scores more goals from its five penalty shots declared the winner. If the score is still even after five rounds, the penalty shoot-out continues with one shot at a time until a winner is determined.

A week after joining the youth team at TB Gingen in 1973 and getting his first taste of the formal rules, Klinsmann came in as a substitute for the final ten minutes of a game against a club called FTSV Kuchen. He was sent onto the field following a quick briefing about a rule that no one had worried about in pickup games. "Hei, was isch eigentlich Abseits?" (Hey, what's this offside thing all about?) Klinsmann asked before going on, as Roland Eitel describes it in his biography, Jürgen Klinsmann — Der Weg Nach Oben. A week later in another game, against SV Altenstadt, Klinsmann scored his first goal in a 5–1 win. Playing on TB Gingen's E-Jugend team, or E-level youth team of eight- to ten-year-olds, Klinsmann soon made a name for himself with his goal-scoring prowess.

Germans are extraordinarily well organized about most things, and that is especially the case when it comes to soccer. Although it is not played at schools or universities but at clubs, there is, nevertheless, a pyramid system with a clear hierarchy in which players can rise steadily through the ranks, usually one level at a time.

When Klinsmann started, soccer for children began with the E-Jugend, where teams played seven against seven (instead of eleven on a side at the senior levels). After the E level, there were four higher levels — D, C, B, and A — separating him and his eight- to ten-year-old teammates from the club's senior adult team. From the E-Jugend, Klinsmann and many of his teammates were promoted to the D-Jugend (eleven to thirteen years old, with nine players a side), then to the C-Jugend (fourteen to fifteen), the B-Jugend (sixteen to seventeen years old, with eleven players a side), and finally the A-Jugend (seventeen to nineteen). Those still playing the game would graduate to the senior adult team — or jump off the pyramid and join the working world. Nowadays, the group levels start even earlier, with F-Jugend (seven to eight years old) and G-Jugend (under seven).

"In that organized form is where they start keeping track of the results, where you have a regular team and play in a regular league, and you have a jersey to wear," Klinsmann says. "That's where you take what you learn in your street game to an organized game."

In Germany, there has always been a subliminal message along with that kind of a tiered structure. The system provides perpetual incentive and encouragement for youngsters to aspire to the next level; it instills a desire to improve from an early age. There are subtle pressures and rewards embedded in the system, which is geared to keep players reaching for the next rung up on the ladder, as if that were the most natural thing in the world.