I wouldn't be too worried about the story and the source. ESPN doesn't seem to know a lot about German football, they certainly don't know what to do with us small-timers who always capture the imagination of their surroundings and have many fans around the city and in the rest of the country. They might know Bayern Munich, but Bayern is the past at the moment, also runs at present which doesn't mean that they won't hit it big time sometime in the near future, but that needs a lot to happen in the club, the structure, the mindset still living off old laurels doesn't do it, their glory days are long gone but some people haven't realised that...
I checked ESPN's website a while ago, they even haven't included last year's German champion in their roster of former champions. Do you see that happening, say with the winner of last year's World Series, no...So one might wonder who is working there and what are they doing...ESPN has not been telling me a new thing for quite a while, I only like to read their columnists who write about the Dutch league, Spain or Germany, or US soccer for that matter...But, their headlines are the same as everywhere else.
Espn got the story from Skysports, Skysports got it from Bild. Bild is a springer press tabloid paper getting their hands dirty on more than one occassion in German post-war history, and they are based in Hamburg. Bild has not realised that exciting developments in German football take place elsewhere and not just in Munich, Hoffenheim, Schalke or at their beloved city club HSV. And, you know all to well what have been doing to the city's pride and glory club for the last 22 years or so
. Seems to me we are at it again this year if you look at yesterday's results.
Bild is equivalent to the UK Sun or the New York Post in the States, if you put it like that. Somewhere in the back sre the Rupert Murdochs and the Rush Limbaughs of Germany lurking about...so you know what I give of that source, nothing, not a jot...
If I would keep counting the times they have written our players off to bigger clubs (stories sell) (in their opinion, this is including the glorious (dull, not topping the table for about 500 days) Bayern (scandalous, one wonders why, it could be stupidity and short-sightedness
), Schalke (a club where some publicity hungry top tier managers always leak a nice story), HSV (their base, their dream to see them doing well) etc.), so you know what I think of it, not much. But, they have no links to our top tier management (part of the secret why we are doing well, because we try to solve our problems internally, sometimes to the dismay of us fans who would like to see a big profile signing or a rumour confirmed but nothing comes of that, including me at the beginning of the season but our management is more foresighted than I would have thought and that is nice to be dissappointed in that way) but we have the exciting players they would like to write about.
Klinsmann had a problem with them when he became Germany manager in 2004 and they discounted his attitude and the fact that he likes to live in a foreign country, my god, who listens to these conservative inbreds
. Bild was mouthing him off from the start because he wasn't their darling. So he simply refused to talk to Bild and they campaigned against him from day one onwards. Only to see us doing ok in the World Cup later...and then, all was honky dory, you know what I mean.
This doesn't mean that Oezil will eventually leave, but I am sure he is undecided at the moment, at least. They would never mention that a Diego might have even considered staying with us, but from what I heard this option was at least considered by him, so we fell short of Juve but not by a million miles and Allofs looked for the right package (got a bad one in my opinion, but maybe this was the maximum you get for a player in his position and the implication that comes with selling and signing classical No. 10 player).
Sorry for my long explanation here. Just give you a bit more of the low-down what is going on the media in Germany. If you want to have a look at some of the sleeping pills I was talking about in the German media, go to dsf.de and watch some snippets from on Doppelpass under the section Fussball and you can see some of the jaded looking doomsday sayers I was talking about, Bild people included (the programme is in German though), but have a look...
