The migration of American players to Germany began in the 1980s. In 1988, Paul Caligiuri, originally signed by Hamburg SV, was starting for Second Division SV Meppen. A group of young players joined lower division clubs, including Brad Smith, Shawn Blakeman, Mike Linenberger, Dario Brose and Chris Veselka.

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AMERICANS IN WEST GERMANY (Soccer America, 1988)

There’s no express lane on path to the pros

By Mike Woitalla

To trace Americans playing soccer in West Germany one would journey to all four corners of the country, and from the youth leagues through the bush leagues and finally to the Professional Second Division, where Paul Caligiuri earns his living.

One would find high schoolers attending American schools to earn a diploma while playing on youth teams in hopes of working their way up to the club’s professional team. One would find Americans who graduated from high schools in the United States, but shunned college to pursue their dreams abroad.

And one would find players who did experience illustrious college careers before leaving their homes for West Germany.

Caligiuri is an exception among the players because he came to West Germany already under contract with a First Division team. But his experience, which entailed having to relinquish a contract after a controversial coaching decision before landing a spot with Second Division SV Meppen last October, proves that even under the most promising circumstances the road to success is a bumpy one.

“I had a bit of luck getting there,” Caligiuri says, “but I didn’t have much luck once I was there.”

Caligiuri has received good reviews for his play as sweeper and says he is comfortable in the small northern German town that lies 10 miles from the Dutch border. But the ordeal of having to leave Hamburg just as a debut in the First Division appeared imminent and the subsequent process of finding a new club was no day at the beach.

There’s nothing that even resembles a beach in the industrial Ruhr area of western West Germany. But a group of Californians has chosen to relocate in Essen — a city made famous by the Krupp family whose steel mills and munition plants provided the world with armaments for two centuries — and are using a minor division team as a starting block for their quest to join Caligiuri in the professional ranks.

Franz Sales Haus Essen plays its ball in the Kreisliga A or county league A, which would be the equivalent of a Seventh Division. (The soccer clubs of West Germany are hierarchically arranged with downward and upward mobility from the county leagues to First Division Bundesliga.)

Twenty-two-year-old Brad Smith, a graduate of Culver City High School, left his home for Franz Sales Haus in 1984. After a half a season, Smith moved to the Oberliga, or Third Division, where he is currently playing with ASC Schöppingen. Many have followed his path to Franz Sales Haus under the guidance of club president Gerd Von Daum, but none has reached the Oberliga yet.

Von Daum first started arranging the importation of American players after taking a Franz Sales Haus youth team to Southern California, where he was impressed with local talent. Smith was one of the first three players Von Daum took to Essen, and the only one of the three to stay. The last to go was Shawn Blakeman, 18, a 1987 graduate of Lynbrook High School in Northern California and a member of the Western Soccer Alliance’s San Jose Earthquakes last summer.

Tim Graefe and Paul Stevenson went to Franz Sales Haus in 1985 and 1986, respectively, and have since moved up to Verbandsliga, or Fourth Division, where they play for BV Alten Essen.

All of these players went to West Germany at their own expense — with dreams, but no promises, of reaching a pro level. Only Smith is able to support himself now, since the amateur Third Division teams are allowed and often able to subsidize their players.

“A 20-year-old who plays in the amateur leagues will find his quest to become a professional very problematic,” says West German national youth team head coach Berti Vogts. “If he is only 17 or 18 and in the Verbandsliga, then maybe there is still a chance, but there are giant problems. The difference in quality of play between the pros and the Verbandsliga is enormous, for one thing, and the amateurs only practice two or three times a week.”

Stevenson, Smith, Graefe and Blakeman do practice more often. Besides two practices each week with their respective teams, they train on their own and also take part in sessions with the West German armed forces team in Essen, which includes on its roster several First Division players.

Graefe, 21, who graduated from South Torrance High School in 1984, left for Essen after a stint at El Camino Junior College. He played two seasons with Franz Sales Haus before joining BV Alten Essen. The first half of the season proved a rough one as Graefe suffered from tonsillitis and spent 13 days in the hospital. He lost 17 pounds and will fight for a starting position as the second half of the season kicks off this month. Like Graefe, Stevenson, who attended Culver City High School and played three years at Cal-State Northridge, is hoping for a successful season that will yield tryout offers from higher division teams.

Odds diminish with age

But the obstacles that Graefe and Stevenson face are manifold and increase with each year spent at the amateur level. It is between the age of 18 and 22 that West German clubs expect players to prove themselves capable of playing professional ball. Because Graefe and Stevenson play for a relatively obscure club, chances are slim that scouts from professional clubs would take notice of their talents.

Also, each professional club has its own youth and Amateur teams from which it feeds. If players like Graefe and Stevenson are invited to a professional club’s tryout, they must prove they are better than that club’s own younger players.

Be it determination or false hopes, these players share a quality that prevents them from putting time limits on their stays abroad. They realize the United States offers no professional outdoor league, so they are willing to make sacrifices and take chances.

“I still have the option of coming back and playing college, which I haven’t ruled out,” said Blakeman when he returned to his San Jose home over the winter break, “but I want to stay there and play pro.”

“I played with a Pasadena team against Gerd Von Daum’s team in a tournament in Anaheim [in the summer of 1985],” said Graefe. “That was my break. I knew of Brad and I talked to him before making my decision. He told me that going to Germany was no holiday. I decided to go. I want to stay as long as I need to, to go as high as I can go and collect as much experience as I can.”

Graefe hasn’t discounted the possibility that while he’s abroad, a professional league will develop in the United States and his experience in West Germany will pay off in his homeland. In the meantime, he is adapting to a new culture.

The most settled of all the Americans is Smith, who lives with his wife Christine and their baby boy in Essen. Christine, Brad’s high school sweetheart, was born and raised in the United States but her parents are German and she has relatives there.

Schöppingen is currently in third place of the Oberliga Westfalen, one of the eight Oberliga leagues that are set up regionally. In 1986, during Smith’s first season with the club, Schöppingen finished first and was one of the nine Oberliga teams to play off for promotion into the Second Division. But Schöppingen failed to win one of the four promotion spots.

For the past two years Smith has been chosen for the select team made up of players from the Westfalen and Nordrhein Oberligen. In December, he went with that team to Africa where they played in six different countries. Next month Smith turns 23. If he doesn’t receive professional offers there, he may consider offers he has already received from Swiss and Dutch clubs, his father Skip said.

Eichmann has advantage at Werder Bremen

“A player should have a professional contract by the time he’s 23,” said Horst Bertl of Cornerstone Sports, Inc., which manages Caligiuri.

Bertl, who played for Hamburg himself until continuing his career in the United States in 1979, arranged Caligiuri’s contract with his former club and also Caligiuri’s current contract with Meppen. Mike Linenberger and Eric Eichmann, who finished college careers at Duke and Clemson, respectively, in 1986, have found playing opportunities in West Germany with the help of Bertl.

Eichmann, 22, a U.S. national team midfielder, is playing with Werder Bremen’s Oberliga team and Linenberger, 22, plays for SC Norderstedt in the same Third Division league. Eichmann’s team is in fifth place while SC Norderstedt, which was promoted only this season from the Verbandsliga, is in 15th place.

Linenberger, who like Bertl lives in the Dallas area, approached Bertl last year and expressed interest in going to West Germany. Bertl arranged a tryout for him with Second Division club FC St. Pauli, which at the time was coached by Willi Reimann, a former teammate of Bertl’s at Hamburg SV who has since left St. Pauli to coach Hamburg SV.

Reimann was impressed with Linenberger, a member of Duke’s 1986 NCAA championship squad, but had no room for him on a squad that was at the time high in the Second Division standings. Linenberger was thus sent across town to SC Norderstedt, where he started in the last four games before the winter break.

“The first month was very difficult,” Linenberger told the Dallas Morning News while he was back in Dallas last December. “Now I’m making friends. The language is coming along very well. I had two years of German in high school and my freshman year in college, but I had forgotten a lot . . . [the style of play in West Germany is] a lot quicker but with a lot of skill. I learned a lot during those weeks with St. Pauli.”

Linenberger says his goal is to play in the Second Division. Eichmann, who returned to Bremen after the winter break with an ankle injury he suffered on the U.S. national team tour of Guatemala, is expected to be fit for the restart of the season this month. He has an advantage over Linenberger and Smith in the fact that his club fields a First Division team.

Werder Bremen provides Eichmann with room, board and pocket money. The club has an ambitious youth and amateur program from which it feeds its professional team, which currently leads the First Division. Players who play for the farm teams of renowned clubs are also more likely to be noticed by other professional teams.

Pro youth clubs offer ‘Harvard’ education

Wolfgang Suhnholz, a veteran of the West German First Division and the NASL who now coaches the Austin Capitals youth club in Texas, compares playing in the youth ranks of a professional club with attending college at Harvard.

“Basically, if you graduate at Harvard, you can start with a $45,000 a year job without anybody ever seeing you,” said Suhnholz, who arranged a tryout for Texan Chris Veselka, 17, with Bayern Munich’s A Jugend or under-18 team.

Suhnholz, who signed a pro contract at 17 with Hertha Berlin and later played at Bayern Munich with Franz Beckenbauer and current Bayern general manager Uli Hoeness, acknowledges that soccer clubs don’t sign players without careful scrutinizing. But he also notes that clubs such as Bayern have very reputable youth programs, and if a player makes a name for himself in it, he will attract attention.

Veselka had a week-long tryout with Bayern in March of 1987. He impressed and was asked to return. He currently attends an American high school there and lives in an apartment on the Bayern club premises. He quickly established himself as one of the team’s top players, but ruptured a tendon early and underwent surgery. After returning to play, the ankle became infected. On top of all that, he had to undergo a tonsillectomy.

Veselka is back in Munich and healthy. Suhnholz says the initial plan was for Veselka, who is a high school senior, to stay one year and then decide whether to go to a top college in the United States. But despite the complications experienced because of health problems, Veselka has enjoyed his adventure.

“He likes it very much,” said Suhnholz. “He wants to explore the country and he likes the coaching and the high level of play and training.”

Suhnholz and Bertl both say they must be very particular in whom they assist finding playing opportunities in West Germany and they have turned down players who asked for help in going abroad. Both have valuable connections to professional clubs, but each time they recommend a player, they are putting their own reputations on the line.

“You cannot just take a very talented player to Germany,” Suhnholz said. “There are many factors involved and the kid has to be mentally tough. It is also very important for the parents to take serious consideration in what they are getting into. The kids will get homesick. There will be telephone calls.

“But I do think it is valuable for a talented player to go to Europe. There is no comparison between the play he will experience there to what he will in the United States. It is a high level of play and very hard practice all year round. The player is under high pressure the whole year.”

Eichmann and Caligiuri had the advantage of international experience — with the U.S. national team — before they went to West Germany. Caligiuri also had an appearance at the UNICEF World All-Star Game in 1986 on his resume. And one of his opponents was Felix Magath, who had just finished playing in the 1986 World Cup and was about to take over as general manager of Hamburg SV.

But Eichmann and Caligiuri are the exceptions. The other American imports have various select team honors that count for nothing in West Germany.

“I think age is very important,” Suhnholz said. “I think the kids have to go over there at a young age. Caligiuri [who was 22 when he went to Hamburg] was fortunate because he had a man like Horst Bertl to set things up. Most German players sign professional contracts at 18 or 19. And it takes about two years to adjust to the pro game so 21 or 22 could be too late. When you pass 22 you’re more or less going to stay [at the level you’re playing], unless your team moves up as a whole. Scouts from pro teams don’t look at many players over 22.”

A player who took a route similar to Veselka’s is Dario Brose of Hughsonville, N.Y. Brose’s mother tells of the 160-mile roundtrip drives they would take to BW Gottschee practices in Ridgewood, N.Y., just so he could play at a more competitive level. Last summer, after completing his junior year at Roy C. Ketcham High School, Brose took a much longer trip to Kaiserslautern.

BW Gottschee junior coordinator Ben Boehm arranged for a three-week tryout with the FC Kaiserslautern, which also fields a First Division club. Kaiserslautern asked Brose to return and he did in October. He now plays, as Veselka does, in the A Jugend. Brose has already been promised a contract with the team’s Third Division team for next season and plans to accept.

Brose’s assimilation into the team and German society has gone smoothly, thanks much to the fact that he speaks fluent German — both his parents were German immigrants. Although club officials say they wish he would have come a year earlier, they also offer a vote of confidence that Brose can make it professionally if he improves his physical fitness and his tackling ability.

The importance of mastering the language is one that cannot be underestimated. Caligiuri, for instance, had to negotiate in German for his contract with Meppen, because the team wanted to sign him in time for an important weekend game and Bertl could not fly to West Germany on such short notice.

An American’s off-the-field manners are vital to his acceptance by the press, players and club officials. Caligiuri has delighted the press with his German and translates for a Finnish teammate who speaks English but no German. While still in Hamburg, coaches and German reporters said they were impressed by what they called Caligiuri’s “professional attitude.”

“What the Americans who are there now accomplish is helping the players who go there in the future,” said Suhnholz.

Lothar Matthaeus: ‘It’s about time!’

The reception of American players in West Germany has been increasingly warm. Perhaps this is because of the respect the U.S. game won when the nation’s greatest player — Franz Beckenbauer — chose to play for the New York Cosmos while still in his prime. And it may have to do with the popularity of American pop culture among the younger generations. But solid performances are what will convince Germans that American players have something tangible to offer the sport — performances accomplished not at an inferior American level but on the West Germans’ own terms.

Caligiuri tells the story of playing with Hamburg SV against defending champion Bayern Munich in 1987 preseason play. Lothar Matthaeus, who at 26 is the most experienced player currently on the West German national team with 57 appearances, had a few words for the American.

“It was a dead ball situation — a free kick for Bayern,” said Caligiuri, who was playing sweeper for Hamburg at the time. “Lothar Matthaeus ran by me and said, ‘It’s about time that we see an American come through.’”