The first greeting comes from a youngish guy who is going about his business in the old TSV Lehnerz clubhouse. His name is Bastian Stumpf. He is one of the coaches and, though there is a considerable language barrier, it turns out that mentioning Jamal Musiala around these parts is a form of entry.
Bastian doesn’t speak much English. So he brings out his laptop and loads up a translation page to confirm that, yes, this is where it all started: a bumpy football pitch on the outskirts of Fulda in Germany’s Hesse region.
It turns out he played against Musiala when they were kids. Were they the same age? “Nein”, he types out. Silly question, really. Musiala rarely played with boys his own age because he was far too good for them. At the age of four, he was moved up to play with six-year-olds. By the time he was six, he was in the under-11s.
Now 21, he is the rising star of Germany’s national team, scoring in two of their first three games in Euro 2024, and Bastian does not need the internet to translate how that feels. You can see it in his face, the way he puffs out his cheeks in disbelief.
Because it’s some story. The pitch looks like it needs a mow. The advertising boards are showing signs of wear and tear and what was once a ticket office is no longer in use and resembles an old bus stop. If you understand grassroots football, you will know its rough edges are part of the charm. This place has bags of it. But it still requires a leap of imagination to look across this rectangular piece of grass and realise it is where the sport witnessed its first moments of Musiala magic.
Bastian is still typing about what exactly that means to the people of Fulda when a car pulls through the entrance, parks behind one of the goals and its occupants start to make their way up the path to the clubhouse.
The driver introduces himself as Dejan Milenkovski, one of Musiala’s former TSV team-mates. Dejan, a 23-year-old student, now plays in the sixth tier of German football. He is with his father, Branko, who spent more than 20 years coaching TSV’s juniors on this pitch. Both of them, as you can imagine, are not short of stories when it comes to a player who has thrilled Euro 2024 audiences with his skills, balance and eye for the spectacular.
Branko Milenkovski, at the TSV Lehnerz pitch where it all started for Jamal Musiala (The Athletic/Daniel Taylor)
“Even at a very young age, you could see he was special,” says Branko. “Every match, he would dribble past three, four or five players. He would dance around them.”
Father and son also have several albums worth of pictorial souvenirs saved on their phones. In many, the young Musiala is wearing a medal around his neck, or holding on to a trophy or some other award, revelling in another victory.
A young Jamal Musiala (bottom right) with his team-mates at TSV Lehnerz (Courtesy of Branko and Dejan Milenkovski)
He always seems to be the smallest kid on the team. His shirt seems a size too big for him. It’s a sunrise of a smile on his face. And the big guy, built like a wardrobe, who is in a lot of the photos, such as below? That is his father, Daniel Richard, otherwise known as Rich, who has always taken a very enthusiastic role on the touchline.
“Jamal’s dad was… stacked,” says Dejan. “He used to do acrobatics, flick-flacks (backflips) and things like that. I’d never seen anyone like him before. He was a very big, strong guy; the exact opposite of Jamal’s physique.”
Musiala (front row, second right) and his father Daniel Richard in the back row (Courtesy Branko and Dejan Milenkovski)
By now, you might be familiar with the story about Musiala moving to England with his family when he was seven and the sequence of events that eventually took him back to Germany to join Bayern Munich.
The story is well known about the young Musiala coming to the attention of Southampton’s talent-spotters, then progressing to Chelsea’s academy before Bayern snapped him up for a mere £170,000 ($215,000). It is also commonly known that he played for England’s under-21s, as well as other age levels, before aligning himself with the country where he was born.
Little has ever been written, however, about his upbringing in Fulda – a small city of 69,000 people, twinned with Wilmington, Delaware, among others – and his formative years at what was his first and, for a long time, only club in Germany.
Fulda, the city where Musiala spent his youth in Germany (The Athletic/Daniel Taylor)
Musiala was actually born 150miles away in Stuttgart on February 26, 2003, as the son of a Nigerian father and a German mother with Polish roots. At the age of two, however, the family moved to Fulda because his mother, Carolin, was starting a bachelor’s degree in social sciences at the city’s university.
Dejan offers to drive us to the old Musiala residence: a four-storey apartment block on one of the busiest routes in and out of the city. Every morning, Carolin had to negotiate four lanes of traffic to get her son to Marquardschule for his lessons. Nor does there seem to be many patches of grass available for a football-mad kid.
What he did have, though, was a local junior team that had a reputation throughout amateur and professional football in this region for its production line of young players.
“Jamal was so good the only way his opponents could stop him was to foul him,” says Dejan. “I won’t ever forget one game when Jamal got the ball in his own defence and dribbled past five or six players. It was typical Jamal; he did this every game.
“This time, however, another player came in from the side to slide tackle and, bang, hit him on the foot. Jamal’s father came on the field and was shouting at the other guy. Other parents started shouting back. It was a crazy scene.”
These days, the club go by the name of SG Barockstadt Fulda-Lehnerz and their first team, competing in the Hessenliga, has moved to a bigger stadium on the other side of Fulda’s main tourist attraction, the stunning baroque cathedral.
The younger players remain at the old sportplatz, where matches are played to the background hum of the nearby B27 highway and supporters have decorated various lampposts with stickers to announce the presence of the Barockstadt Brigade and denounce rival club KSV Hessen Kassel (Nobody easily offended should translate the meaning of “Scheiss KSV”).
The football ground where Jamal Musiala was schooled (The Athletic/Daniel Taylor)
Branko played for TSV in their peak years of competing in Germany’s fourth division. He was a youth international for North Macedonia before moving to Germany and, having settled in Fulda, he has helped numerous players to professional careers. But there has never been any doubt about who was the best.
One game in particular stands out. “It was a cup final,” says Branko. “We were playing our biggest rivals and Jamal scored twice to win us the tournament. He was six years old, playing against boys five years older than him.”
The only surprise, perhaps, is that the clubhouse walls are not lined with pictures of the young Musalia and that, walking through the town centre, you don’t see his face staring back from window displays.
Maybe they are just not showy people in Fulda. Don’t read too much into it, though. He was back here last year to launch the Team Musiala Foundation when the mayor invited him to sign The Golden Book of Fulda — one of the highest honours for anyone from the city.
It also turns out Musiala has returned to Fulda on another occasion, in 2017, when he went back to his hometown for the first time since leaving Germany six years earlier. He wanted his sister, Latisha, to see her birthplace and to show his little brother, Jerrell, what their life used to look like.
It was during the school holidays and, to begin with, he assumed they would not be allowed to see his old classroom. This, however, was a special occasion. Christoph Schulte, the head teacher, opened up the school so Jamal could go in, accompanied by his family and two of his old friends. Inevitably, a couple of footballs were brought out of the cupboards, meaning an impromptu kickabout in the sports hall.
Marquardschule, Musiala’s old school in Fulda (The Athletic/Daniel Taylor)
Fulda has produced some other notable sports people. Karl Storch won a silver medal in the hammer throw at the 1952 Olympics. Thorsten Hohmann, a three-time world pool champion, was raised here. So was Sebastian Kehl, the former Borussia Dortmund and Germany international midfielder
Nobody, though, has had Musiala’s impact and, in the buildup to Euro 2024, the local newspaper, Fuldaer Zeitung, printed good-luck messages from some of his former team-mates.
“I wish Jamal all the best and hope he can live his dream for as long as possible”, said Maximilian Weisbacker, the team’s former goalkeeper. “Manuel Neuer was always my idol. I have no words to explain how it feels that a former team-mate of mine is playing with him at Bayern and for the national team.”
The next assignment for ‘Bambi’ is to help Germany reach the quarter-finals at Denmark’s expense. At the same time, he will be aiming to demonstrate why many observers rank him among the tournament’s outstanding performers so far.
Musiala has been a star for Germany in these Euros (Damien Meyer/AFP via Getty Images)
A lot has happened since those early days in Fulda when, in one of his first games, the opposition scored and the four-year-old Musiala — not realising, perhaps, the competitive nature of the sport — joined in with their cheering.
Today’s Musiala is establishing himself as a superstar of his generation. But if you look closely, his old friends and team-mates reckon you can still see the Fulda effect.
“Some of the movements that he does now are the same that he did with us,” says Dejan, looking out towards the piece of land where it all started.
“It’s very special, and also a bit crazy, to think that he used to play with me on this field.”
(Top photos: Getty Images; courtesy Branko and Dejan Milenkovski; design: Eamonn Dalton)
