Leicester City’s current woes in the English Premier League show that sudden and unexpected success isn’t always the most sustainable type of good fortune. While the Foxes still have time to turn things around, many clubs before them managed to scale great heights only to fall back to a more modest level of performance. Today, Club 25 is examining the shirt that led one such team to the title in the German Bundesliga.
VFB Stuttgart, from the eponymous city located in the German state of Baden-Württemburg, is an old and proud membership-based club. Having been founded some 123 years ago, the Verein für Bewegungsspiele Stuttgart 1893 e.V. has some 47,000 members, making it the 5th largest verein in Germany.
The club is known for its distinct white shirts with a red band running across the chest (an addition made to the plain white shirts the team wore until 1925, when a group of youth players suggested adding this particular detail to help differentiate the team from other local clubs). With some exceptions (plain white in the 70’s and a band that stopped short of the sides in the 90’s), the club has always faithfully worn this design until this day.
While unremarkable on the surface, this particular top is a hot item amongst fans due to its appearance during the 2006-2007 season, when their team clinched the German Meisterschaft.
Bar a second place in 2002-2003, Stuttgart had never really challenged for the top spot in the league since their 4th championship in the early 90’s. Bouncing between UEFA Cup qualifying positions and mid table mediocrity, the club decided to sack Italian coach Giovanni Trappatoni halfway through the 05-06 season as the club slowly lost sight of a top 6 qualification. Under new coach Armin Veh, the aging team finished 9th out of 18 teams.
That summer, ex-Hansa Rostock man Veh implemented a focus on young and inexperienced (or rather, cheap) players. Big names like captain Zvonimir Soldo left, with homegrown talents like Sami Khedira and Mario Gómez joining the first team from the reserve side. They joined the likes of players such as goalie Timo Hildebrand, Markus Babbel, Ludovic Magnin, and Cacau, whose signatures grace the lower half of this particular top.
With a somewhat unremarkable Puma shirt (bar for the small VFB wordmark on the back of the neck and a weird graffiti effect within the red chest band), the team launched an all-out attack on champions Bayern München, which saw Die Schwaben (as VFB is also known) which resulted in the team topping the table in November, the first time in years it had led the pack.
Against all odds, Stuttgart managed to hold on to first place, in no small part thanks to a string of 8 consecutive victories to end the season with. Although the final match, against East German team Energie Cottbus, saw the team go 0-1 down, VFB managed to win the match and finish the season with 70 points out of 34 games, with Schalke 04 hot on their heels with 68.
With Mario Gómez scoring 14 goals for the team that season and being retained for 07-08, the future looked rosy for Veh’s boys. The good spirit didn’t last, however, as VFB crashed out of their Champions League group in 4th place (behind Barcelona, Lyon and Glasgow Rangers) before finishing the Bundesliga season in 6th position.
The team had the privilege of wearing the Deutscher Meister badge during 07-08, although it already features on this particular 06-07 top, which was branded with the number 5 (representing the five times Stuttgart won the league) on the back.
Fast forward a decade, and we find Stuttgart’s biggest boys (the Stuttgarter kickers languish in the obscurity that is the Regionalliga) in the 2nd Bundesliga. After being miraculously saved from relegation by Dutch manager Huub Stevens two seasons in a row, the team ultimately succumbed by finishing 17th out of 18 in 15-16. Now, at the time of writing, they are in first place with a three point lead over Hannover 96 and thusly well on their way to promotion back to the first tier.
As such, Club 25 is confident that we will see the team’s beautiful logo back in the top tier of German football sooner rather than later. While the yellow shield with three black rods may seem a bit out of place amongst the red and white, it is actually a signifier of the team’s pride in their home state of Baden-Württemberg as these are the three Hirschgeweihe (or deer antlers to non-German speaking audiences) that one can find in the state’s heraldry.
All in all, Stuttgart seems to be on the up-and-up. Having lived the heroic tale of winning the country’s highest honour as underdogs, VFB shows us that the struggles Leicester is experiencing right now are perhaps but a natural progression from punching above one’s weight for a full season. With that in mind one can rest assured that, even with relegation being an option, there will always be better days.
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