Hamburg, a Bundesliga giant almost back from brink – led by a cast of unlikely characters

New York Times

10-03-2025

Spring brings relief in Hamburg. The cold thaws, the hats and gloves are put away, and the sun emerges, bright and fresh, ready to dance on the harbour water.
But for Hamburger SV, the city's biggest football club, the end of winter usually brings a collapse in form, and a bitter end to another attempt to win promotion back to the Bundesliga.
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The last seven years have been humiliating. HSV are a six-time national champion, they won the European Cup in 1983 and play in front of 57,000 fans at home, every single game. And yet six times they have tried to climb out of the 2.Bundesliga since their relegation in 2018 and six times they have failed. Twice they have finished third and been beaten in a relegation play-off. Four times they have finished fourth. Nearly every season starts strongly in autumn and winter, teases promotion, before all that promise melts away in the spring sun.
It's not just that HSV play badly when it matters. Their failures are often cloaked in dark comedy. In 2023, they had one foot back in the Bundesliga only for Heidenheim to score twice in an 11-minute stoppage time and slam the door in their face. In 2022, they built a 1-0 lead in the first leg of their play-off with Hertha Berlin, only then to be beaten 2-0 back in Hamburg. That was an awful, funereal night, made worse by the fact that Hertha were coached by Felix Magath, who scored HSV's winning goal in that 1983 European Cup win.
And last season, because the universe wanted to mock HSV one more time, St.Pauli, the other Hamburg club, won promotion to the Bundesliga as champions of the 2.Bundesliga, despite a fraction of the budget.
But 2025 might be different. On Saturday night, HSV beat Fortuna Dusseldorf 4-1 at the Volksparkstadion. It is one of the great destinations of German football and it produced another fabulous night, full of fluent football and goals, played in a thumping, febrile atmosphere. By full time, HSV had maintained their one-point lead at the top of a hopelessly tight division and, with nine games to go, the Bundesliga is almost in reach.
The irony is that HSV are being led up the mountain by a cast of unlikely characters — by a free-transfer centre-forward who the game had given up on and a 34-year-old head coach without any prior full-time experience.
Between 2018 and 2024, the years following relegation, HSV employed eight different coaches. Among them were idealists and pragmatists, technocrats and traditionalists. Nothing has worked. When Steffen Baumgart, the most recent, was sacked in November 2024, he was replaced on an interim basis by Merlin Polzin.
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Polzin was born in Hamburg and grew up an HSV fan. Coincidentally, the coach he defeated on Saturday night, Daniel Thioune, is not only one of his predecessors, but also the man responsible for setting his career's path. In 2014, Thioune was coaching Osnabruck's under-17 side and appointed Polzin as his assistant. Six years later, when Thioune had built his own reputation to the point of being appointed head coach at HSV, he brought Polzin along as his assistant — and he has been there since.
But for the pencil moustache of a 1920s aristocrat, Polzin would look a decade younger than he really is. He was never a coaching prodigy and despite serving as a brief interim after Tim Walter was dismissed in February 2024, there was no sense of HSV sitting on any sort of saviour when Baumgart departed and he reprised the role.
The assumption had always been that the club needed someone strong — a name, a personality. By contrast, Polzin is unproven and quiet. Those who know him describe a studious, fiercely intelligent and conciliatory character. The results, from someone presumed antithetical to everything HSV were believed to need, have been excellent.
When Polzin inherited the side, they were in seventh place, had just 20 points from 13 games, and were winless in five matches. Since he took control — and earned the job permanently — they have lost once in four months, during which individually and collectively, the team has looked its healthiest in years.
Jean-Luc Dompe, an absurdly gifted but maddeningly mercurial French winger, is a consistent threat. Ludovit Reis, whose form and fitness has been tenuous for much of the last year, looks again like a player with a Bundesliga future. And HSV are balanced with the ball and far more secure without it.
Last weekend in Paderborn, they lost badly, the home side winning 2-0. It was Polzin's first loss and a dispiriting one, but the win over Fortuna was a comprehensive response. HSV took the lead with a thunderbolt from full-back Miro Muheim. Dawid Kownacki then equalised later in the first half, before Davie Selke headed the hosts back into a lead that they would never lose.
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And Selke, 30, is as unlikely a story as Polzin.
He moved to HSV on a free transfer in the summer 2024, having made more than 200 Bundesliga appearances for Werder Bremen, RB Leipzig, Hertha Berlin and Koln, but without ever scoring more than 10 goals in a league season, nor living up to the promise that made him a regular in Germany's international youth teams.
When he arrived, it was just to provide back-up to Robert Glatzel, who has consistently scored goals at 2.Bundesliga level and was presumed integral to any hope of promotion. So much so that when Glatzel suffered a ruptured tendon in his hip during an October friendly, the season's trajectory seemed to change.
Glatzel has not played since and the season did change — eventually for the better. Selke, who averaged roughly one goal every five Bundesliga games, has 14 from 17 starts in the second division. To emphasise just how unforeseen this form has been, it's worth recalling a story from his time at Werder Bremen.
In 2020-21, Selke was on loan at the Weserstadion and scored three goals all season as Werder were relegated. According to a mean-spirited meme of the time, some of the resulting disappointment was dampened, however, by freeing the club from their obligation to make Selke's move permanent for €12m. That's how Selke was perceived.
Four years later, he is in the right place at the right time, fulfilling a role that nobody imagined. In February he scored both goals — including a last-minute penalty — in a 2-1 win away at Prussen Munster, a 90th-minute equaliser in Regensburg, and his team's first two goals in a 3-0 win over Kaiserslautern.
Without Selke's goals, there would be no hope. A fierce competitor who adores the physical aspect of the game and must be horrible to play against, Selke is a force — always cajoling, challenging and holding his team-mates to account. He broke his cheekbone in January and has been wearing a face mask since. Rather than disrupt his form, it seems to have made him better — more menacing, more determined, even more onerous to mark.
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And nobody is more popular. When Selke scored his goal on Saturday and dropped to his knees, the stadium announcer howled his name out across the tannoy and the stadium boomed it back with shuddering volume. A goalscorer and a leader. In stoppage time, 18-year-old academy prospect Otto Stange scored to make it 4-1. Selke had been substituted by then, but raced down the touchline to celebrate with his young team-mate, wrapping him in a bear hug and kissing his cheek.
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He has seen the good and the bad in the game. He knows what it is to bask in its adulation, but to feel its crueler, colder side too. Someone of that experience is valuable to HSV, because not every player is equipped to cope with the challenge of the club's situation. The down years have created a lot of bad memories and many of this squad have lived through the disappointments of recent seasons. The result is a neurosis that is never far from the surface and a fragility that teams in the 2.Bundesliga enjoy trying to expose. A lot of knees have buckled.
But Selke has become part of the resistance to that. This is probably his last chance with a major club and the urgency with which he has embraced that challenge suggests he understands that. But his tangible spirit has become something important; it has perpetuated a healthy rage which has replaced the usual weakness. If they do go up, it will be impossible to separate him from that achievement — and six months ago, that would have been a ridiculous situation to imagine.
Nobody wants to speak about that yet. The nine remaining games might as well be 100. Repeated failure has bred paranoia in Hamburg and the fear that just talking about promotion will somehow scare it away.
But the sun is up, the cold has gone, and — still — HSV are keeping their feet.