San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
FROM UNDERDOG TO STAR IN GERMANY
Socal native Hoppe rises with FC Shalke, could fill U.S. hole
With his teammate leading a counterattack down the left flank, Matthew Hoppe gestured toward the open space on the near side of the penalty box.
Hoppe broke from his marker’s shoulder and ran on to the slanted pass. Without breaking stride, he calmly chipped the ball with his left foot over the oncoming goalkeeper and into the net.
Only 18 months after moving to Germany, the 19year-old Hoppe had scored his first goal in the Bundesliga for Schalke’s first team.
He wasn’t finished. Later in the game, lightning struck again.
And again.
By the end of Schalke’s 4-0 destruction of Hoffenheim, the previously unknown striker from Yorba Linda had become the first American to score a hat trick in Germany’s top league.
“I don’t know how to feel,” a smiling Hoppe said in a televised post-match interview.
In his childhood home on the other side of the globe, his family celebrated. His parents watched a live stream of the game from their bed with his older sister. His father, Tom Hoppe, noted the first goal was scored on the kind of shot he practiced for hours at local parks.
“We do chips all the time,” Tom said in a recent phone interview.
While Matthew was widely viewed as an overnight sensation after that three-goal performance on Jan. 9, his father described his journey as one that required patience. In his early years, he was overshadowed by the likes of youth club teammate Efrain Alvarez. As an undersized midfielder, he was cut from the Galaxy’s academy. Until he signed with Schalke, he was never invited to train with any of the U.S.’S agegroup national teams.
“He’s always been a little bit of an underdog,” Tom said.
Not anymore. Matthew followed his hat trick by scoring in his next game against Frankfurt and again in his game after that against Koln. The five goals he scored in that three-game stretch made him the talk of American soccer, as he has emerged as a potential solution for the U.S. national team’s longstanding problems at center forward.
“It’s great to see him reach these heights and now he has to maintain it,” U.S. coach Gregg Berhalter said in a videoconference. “If he does that, I’m sure he’ll get an opportunity with the national team.”
The possibility of Hoppe becoming the U.S.’S No. 9 was nonexistent until about 2½ years ago and not only because of his low profile. Most players drop back in the field as they grow older and the competition improves.
Hoppe, who was a midfielder for most of his life, is a rare exception who moved in the opposite direction.
He was late in developing the 6-foot-3 frame that provides him with the necessary physicality to play up front. His father estimates that he was around 5-foot-4 when he started his freshman year at Yorba Linda High.
“Some of these kids hit their peak at 13, 14,” Jimmy Nordberg said. “Matthew was definitely not that kid.”
Nordberg started coaching Hoppe when he was 9 or 10 years old on a youth club that was affiliated with a reincarnated version of the North American Soccer League’s New York Cosmos.
Alvarez eventually moved on to the academy of Chivas USA, the Major League Soccer team that drafted his older brother. Hoppe later joined the Galaxy’s youth setup.
But Chivas USA disbanded after the 2014 season. Many of its academy players, including Alvarez, subsequently switched to the Galaxy. Hoppe was let go.
“There wasn’t any room for him,” Tom said.
The setback resulted in a move to the Irvine Strikers, where he played under famed youth coach Don Ebert, who, in turn, introduced him to German soccer.
Under Ebert, the captain of the 1980 U.S. Olympic soccer team, Hoppe continued to play in the midfield but was scoring regularly against older competition.
“His timing of runs is the best I’ve seen as a youth player,” said Ebert, who compared that ability to that of another of his former players, U.S. national team striker Bobby Wood.
Ebert thought enough of Hoppe to invite him on a two-week tour of Germany as part of a small group of Strikers players from various age groups. The trip included training sessions with a number of Bundesliga teams.
“The reason you take kids over there is that sometimes the light goes on,” Ebert said. “They see it, they touch it and they want it.”
Which is what happened to Hoppe.
“I want to make it here,” Ebert recalled Hoppe telling him.
The shift in mindset resulted in Hoppe’s first major move, which was to Barcelona’s U.s.-based residency academy in Casa Grande, N.M.
There was a chance occurrence at the tryout. Hoppe wasn’t on the list of invited players, according to his father.
“Go play striker,” one of the evaluators told him.
Hoppe scored twice in the first 10 minutes. He didn’t know it at the time, but he had found a new position. Hoppe was now a 6footer and the Barcelona Academy developed him as a striker. Playing alongside current Galaxy defender Julian Araujo, he became the leading scorer of the U.S. Soccer Development Academy, a network of academies and youth clubs across the country.
“He blew up physically,” San Diego State coach Lev Kirschner said.
With the help of assistant coach Josh Hill, Kirschner convinced Hoppe to sign with the Aztecs. But Hoppe never played for him.
In the summer of 2019, Hoppe went to a couple of tryouts in Germany, including a trial with Schalke that resulted in a contract.
He played his first season in Germany with the club’s under-19 team, after which he was promoted to the reserves.
He made his first-team debut in November. The game in which he scored the hat trick was only his third start.
The game changed everything.
When Tom visited his son earlier this month, he found his image everywhere, from television screens to newspapers. Schalke’s hometown of Gelsenkirchen was on lockdown, but Tom said it wasn’t uncommon for Matthew to be stopped by strangers.
“It’s funny seeing when people in Germany ask to take pictures with him or get autographs,” Tom said.