22-05-2025
The journeyman Captain America and an unlikely shot at German Cup glory
On Saturday in Berlin, Mael Corboz will lead Arminia Bielefeld out for the final of the DFB-Pokal, the German Cup. As he emerges from the Olympiastadion's tunnel and into the light, he and his team will be greeted by 75,000 people and a furnace of noise, the culmination of their season of miracles.
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It will be then that he knows that he was good enough to make it.
Corboz was born in Alabama and raised in New Jersey. Now 30, the American has been toiling in European football for nearly 10 years. He has suffered setbacks, rejection and self-doubt in that time, but now finds himself at the heart of a fairytale.
Arminia are from the 3. Liga, the German third tier, and have slain dragon after dragon on the way to this final. There they will face the Bundesliga's Stuttgart who, just a few months ago, were playing Real Madrid in the Champions League.
It is not a normal situation. But neither is Corboz a normal player.
He is a voracious reader and a searching thinker. Someone who will talk to you about Marcel Proust, Albert Camus and theories of randomness. He is the CEO of his own sustainability consultancy, which he founded and runs in his spare time between being a footballer, a husband and a father of a daughter who will soon turn six months old.
But this weekend he will just be Arminia's captain and central midfielder.
And with a fresh espresso poured, and the club's training pitches glinting in the sun through a window over his shoulder, he pauses, reflecting on what it is within his personality that makes him suited to wearing the armband.
'I'm good at worrying,' he tells The Athletic. 'I like to have an eye on everything during the week and to put everything in place to be ready for the weekend.
'And it's my job — or part of my job — to have some fear, so that I can get a feel for what everyone else needs. I have a good sense for who needs to be talked to during the week. If a player is down, maybe I should put an arm around his shoulder and find out what's going on.'
Nobody seems down. In an upstairs players' lounge, two of his team-mates are gathered around a dartboard, laughing. All around the facility there are reminders of what has been achieved and what is still to come. Signed commemorative jerseys lie on one table. Limited-edition promotional posters for the final are stacked on another.
On a whiteboard in a coaches' room, there is a list of opponents Arminia have faced in the Pokal this season, with all but one of them now crossed through — Stuttgart.
Just being in the building must be exciting. Make no mistake, though: Arminia are going to Berlin to win.
'We have a slogan on the walls downstairs,' Corboz says. 'It says: one team, 100 per cent every day. Intensity is the one thing you can control. I can have a good day on the ball. I can have a bad day on the ball, but I know that I control how hard I work every single day.'
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It's that intensity that has made Arminia formidable.
Coached by Mitch Kniat and full of previously unknown players, like Corboz, it has taken them five rounds to reach Berlin with each game against teams from higher divisions.
Four were from the Bundesliga but none had an answer for Arminia's waspish pressing, their lightning-quick counter attacks, and their coaching staff's exhaustive preparation and tactical dexterity.
Union Berlin, Freiburg and Werder Bremen were beaten. Along the way, the German public adopted new players as their own, as Arminia's run went on and on. Marius Worl, Louis Oppie, Jonas Kersken, Sam Schreck, Christopher Lannert; they have become more than just local heroes.
In the semi-final, Arminia were drawn against Xabi Alonso's mighty Bayer Leverkusen, the defending champions and one of the best teams in Europe.
'I always tell this story,' Corboz says. 'Ahead of that game, our analysts watched 16 different Leverkusen games — the last 16 they have played — trying to find a weakness. Then they told us they couldn't find any.'
Yet, at the SchucoArena, their bearpit home stadium, Arminia made Leverkusen as uncomfortable as anyone did all season.
When the whistle blew on a 2-1 win, Arminia's players and coaches celebrated with wild-eyed disbelief. And as the stands above him rattled with joy and flags bearing Arminia's blue, black and white tricolour fluttered in the night, Corboz roared back in defiance.
'We have a mindset before those games,' Corboz explains. 'We know that we have to go all in and that everything has to work out. It's almost liberating mentally because you have no pressure. We have one shot at this. We're going to go for it all.
'If it works, great. If it doesn't, then the underdog is supposed to lose.'
On a tour of the training ground, which only opened in August 2024, Corboz introduces The Athletic to an analyst, bunkered in between monitors and cheesecake, searching for gaps in Stuttgart.
He shows us the gym, where the strength and conditioning coach — who helped build this monster of a team — is working out alone. And then the recovery sauna, which was actually paid for by the prize money from beating Union Berlin in the second round.
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It's estimated that Arminia's cup run has already earned the club somewhere in the region of €8million (£6.7m; $9m). Coupled with the promotion clinched two weeks ago, which will see them compete in the more affluent 2. Bundesliga next season, it's easy to see the road ahead.
It is hard to compute that, only 12 months ago, Arminia seemed headed for black hole.
They were relegated from the Bundesliga in 2022, then again the next year. In 2024, when Corboz arrived, they came close to falling down to the fourth tier, which is a regional, semi-professional level in Germany.
Corboz, too, has stood on the brink of footballing oblivion.
This season, he was voted the 3. Liga's player of the year. His bushy, tied-back hair has temporarily made him one of the most recognisable players in the country, but this has been a long, exacting road.
His parents are from Grenoble, in France. His father is a research scientist who played football in the French third division while completing his PhD. And while a post-doctorate year in Alabama was supposed to last 12 months, the family ended up staying before moving to New Jersey when Mael was three.
European football followed them.
'We always found a way to get the games,' he says. 'I grew up watching Ligue 1 and following the Ligue 2 results. I remember the Bordeaux team with Yoann Gourcuff. He was my favourite player and his poster is still up in my room at home.'
In the summers, he played foot-tennis in the garden with his sisters and father. Daphne and Rachel both now play professionally in France, for Paris FC and Reims. Rachel will be in Berlin to watch the final. So will her mother and father, to support Mael. Daphne has a wedding to go to that was arranged many months ago, back when the idea of her brother playing in the German cup final would have sounded ridiculous.
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It's a day that he never saw coming, either.
Corboz played his college football for Rutgers and at the University of Maryland, before joining New York Red Bulls. With a crowded midfield ahead of him, he made the decision to drop into the United Soccer League (USL) with the Wilmington Hammerheads, who had an association with MSV Duisburg, from a town just outside Dortmund.
They would become his first European club — in the 3. Liga that he and his Arminia team-mates have just won.
'I always had it in mind to go to Germany,' he says. 'I was playing in the USL and knew I could play at that level. So, it was a question of taking the risk or losing the chance. You have to go for it. In the worst-case scenario, you can talk for the rest of your life about how you lived in Germany for two years. And I've always tried to get out of whatever makes me feel comfortable, to see if I can survive.'
His football career might not have survived. When he arrived in Germany, he lived alone and was quickly cast to the periphery.
'Duisburg were in first place the whole season, but I didn't play a game. Every day I would ask myself: 'What the hell are you doing here?' My whole identity is based on being a footballer and, all of a sudden, I was a football player who didn't play football.'
Isolated in a foreign country, doubt descended. Football had dictated his life's choices. It had persuaded him against potentially attending an Ivy League college and had led him instead to Germany's old industrial heartland.
'I spent too much time going home and just thinking about training and what I had to do the next day. It would turn over in my mind, and I ended up losing all spontaneity in how I played.
'When you get external feedback — constant external feedback — that you're not good enough to even be in the squad at the weekend, then anyone self-reflective will ask whether they're good enough.'
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He thought of going home, back to his comfort zone and to friends who were building their lives back in the U.S.. Ultimately, he stayed, but needed good fortune just to find a new club, even at the level below.
'I had a huge amount of luck just getting to the fourth division,' he says of his move to lowly SG Wattenscheid in 2017. 'The coach had never seen me play, but he had been a team-mate of my agent at the time, and trusted him blindly to take me.'
Good form in Wattenscheid yielded a move to Go Ahead Eagles, a Dutch second division club from the town of Deventer. It was another step on the road back; it was also where he began to think about life after football.
'My university degree is in mechanical engineering, with a specialisation in energy systems. I'd always wanted to work in that area, developing new technologies and stuff like that, but then I obviously went all-in on football.
'When I was at Go Ahead Eagles, I just asked the club: I had all this time and this background, so is there anything I can help with?
'I lived right by their stadium and I would see all the plastic cups lying around after the games. I wanted to know what we were doing with them, and whether we were just burning them with the rest of the trash. So I went into deep research.
'How can we put a new cup system in the place? What are the financial implications?'
The result was that Go Ahead became the first club in the country to use 100 per cent recycled cups. The system that Corboz came up with is still in place now.
Today, that work is contained within elevengreen, the consultancy Corboz founded, which advises clubs on how to incorporate sustainability into their existing structures. Whatever spare time he has away from football is spent running the company from his office at home.
He would return to Germany in 2020, joining SC Verl, a team from a tiny town and punching above their weight in the 3. Liga.
It was there that he proved to himself that he could play at that level — vanquishing the labels from earlier in his career — and where he first played for Kniat. When Kniat moved to Arminia in 2023, Corboz followed him a year later. This season, he became his captain.
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'I lived in Bielefeld when I played for Verl. So I was there when the club was in the Bundesliga and the 2. Bundesliga, then for their relegation into the third division,' he says. 'That was a huge factor in me coming here. On matchdays, I had seen that the city was full of jerseys, scarves and Armenia Bielefeld's colours. That's a club. And so when the opportunity arose to come, I was not missing the train.'
It was a good decision, but not an easy option.
In 2023, a year after relegation from the Bundesliga, Arminia finished 16th in the 2. Bundesliga and faced a two-legged relegation play-off against Wiehen Wiesbaden, the third-placed team from the division below.
They lost the first game in Wiesbaden 4-0. Late in the second half, with Arminia three goals down, the travelling fans were so angry that Fabian Klos, the club legend from whom Corboz inherited the captaincy, had to persuade them not to invade the pitch.
It was the bottoming-out moment. Arminia had had five different coaches in 14 months and the drain of playing talent had left them in a tailspin. The fans were mutinous.
In his post-game interview, Klos was in tears. When asked whether he blamed those supporters for how angry they were, tellingly he said no.
Arminia failed to overturn that deficit and were relegated a few weeks later. The next season, Corboz arrived, becoming part of a fragile, newly-built team, that was immediately exposed to enormous pressure. Mass redundancies would have followed another relegation. Almost every player would have had to leave. It would have been the kind of cataclysmic event that football clubs can take decades from which to recover.
Corboz and his team-mates were held to the fire. They survived — just.
'Last year was hell for us,' Corboz concedes. 'We inherited that situation and suddenly felt the pressure of the club, the fans and the city. Every guy who went through that period was terrified, but at the end of the day it was on us to deal with it.
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'And now fast forward a year and this could be the greatest season the club has ever had, with all the same guys.'
The same team and the same coach, but hardened by having to walk through the rain. Corboz and Arminia Bielefeld are heading to Berlin with one more river to cross.
