In over 50 years, English players have only very rarely found their way to the Bundesliga. The first came at the end of the seventies, but they have all since disappeared. However, their stories remain.
In 1977, several clubs attempted to break the stranglehold on the title held by Bayern München and Borussia Mönchengladbach. After 1. FC Köln completed the first transfer to break the million mark the year before and Eintracht Braunschweig became the first club to bring a Real Madrid player to the Bundesliga, Hamburg decided to do something novel as well: sign a player from England.
"I wanted to sign a star," said HSV manager Peter Krohn, and he didn't hold back, signing the next European Player of the Year, Kevin Keegan from Liverpool. The man known as the 'Mighty Mouse' in Britain came for the record sum of 1.6 million Marks.
The transfer was the trigger for mass euphoria not just in Hamburg, but in the entire Bundesliga. However, his teammates didn't react so positively. They were jealous of the new glamour boy and ignored him on and off the pitch. "Things didn't work out at first," said Felix Magath 40 years later. "Kevin was different from us, people expected more of him and he was far more professional than the others who were at HSV back then." His performances also failed to live up to expectations and his first season was something of a flop. HSV ended in tenth place and in September 1978, Keegan sat in new sporting director Günter Netzer's office and said the famous words: "Use me or sell me!" Netzer assured him new manager Branko Zebec would get the most out of him, and he wasn't wrong. Keegan scored in pretty much every game as HSV won the Bundesliga for the first time in their history in 1979.
Only a few months later, German fans were treated to another English talent. Anthony Woodcock, a striker, transferred from European Cup winners Nottingham Forest to 1. FC Köln, who had to reach deep into their pockets, paying the equivalent of £2,700,000 in today's money. 5,000 spectators turned up to his first training session, a sensation in those days. The 1978 PFA Young Player of the Year didn't bring the glamour of Keegan – he was "a sportsman from tip to toe," as described by the Kicker correspondent for England. Woodcock stayed for two and a half years and scored 15 goals in the 1981/82 season. He was adored in Cologne and returned in 1986 for two years before ending his career with local rivals Fortuna. He came back for a second time in 1994 as manager for VfB Leipzig.
To date, the most successful Englishman in the Bundesliga is Owen Hargreaves. Bayern didn't have to pay much for the midfielder, either, with Ottmar Hitzfeld bringing him up from the club's own second team in 2001. Much to everyone's surprise, Hitzfeld deployed the 20-year-old in Bayern's blockbuster Champions League clashes. His performance against Real Madrid in the semi-finals earned him a place in the starting line-up for the final against Valencia, where he became one of Bayern's heroes of Milan, winning the club's first Champions League title. He won four league titles in six years in Munich.
Injuries hampered the career of Peter Hobday, who earned two promotions to the Bundesliga: with Hannover 96 in 1987 and with Arminia Bielefeld in 1996. His longest stint came at Eintracht Frankfurt, where he played for two seasons, making just 17 appearances. Another player to feature fleetingly in the history of the Bundesliga is Michael Mancienne, whom HSV purchased from Chelsea before selling to Nottingham Forest just two years later. He failed to make the grade in Hamburg, but "nobody could criticise the Londoner's attitude," reported the 'Hamburger Abendblatt'.
