HOFFENHEIM READY FOR FAMILIAR FOE

WHAT motivates a club to pay £3.5m for an skinny, unproven teenager from the Brazilian port city of Maceió and bring him to the small village of Hoffenheim in south-west Germany. It cannot just be prodigious talent.

“You find lots of top class players in Brazil, but can they adjust to the lifestyle and the style of football in England or in Germany,” asks Lutz Pfannenstiel, a former Wimbledon, Nottingham Forest and Bradford Park Avenue goalkeeper and now Hoffenheim’s head of international relations and scouting.

Pfannenstiel had only been working for the Bundesliga club for a few months when in 2010, after recommendations from the player’s agency, he personally watched a 19-year-old called Roberto Firmino. Hoffenheim soon agreed a deal with Tombense, Firmino’s club at the time, and he arrived in his new, colder, harsher surroundings in the New Year.

“He was an ‘unwritten paper’,” Pfannenstiel explains. “Nobody really knew that much of him but, the directors thought that he could be what we were looking for. He did not come and have an impact within three days. When he came he was much lighter but he worked very hard and took on a lot of the German mentality, doing extra work and being very disciplined.”

Firmino duties are often off the ball as much as on it, in defence as much as attack. He is the one to lead Jurgen Klopp’s famous press from the front, just as he did at Hoffenheim.

“I wouldn’t describe him as a typical Brazilian player, he’s a player who has Brazilian skills and Brazilian attributes, but his game comes through that mixture with the German style of play,” Pfannenstiel says.

“He was a likeable guy who got on with everybody. He had a slight problem, like all Brazilians, at the start with the language, but he learned it also quite fast. He just seemed to one of these guys who understood our way of playing very, very fast.

“For me it was not a doubt that he would succeed at Liverpool, because of that style of play.” (© Independent News Service)