With the national team failing miserably in Euro 2004 and all clubs failing to make an impact in European competitions, German football remained much in deep crisis during this year.

After the usual touch of the sun of the winter break, Werder Bremen returned to action at the start of the year four points clear at the top. It was the first time they had been crowned ‘autumn champions’ for 13 years.

Werder have accustomed their fans to post-winter slumps in recent years. But there had been no sign of them coming off the rails in 2004.Inspired by the vision of rejuvenated French playmaker Johan Micoud and the obduracy of his fellow countryman Valerien Ismael in central defence, Werder were a country mile clear at the top of the Bundesliga at the end of March and also in the German Cup final. Werder Bremen clinched their first Bundesliga title since 1993 by beating closest rivals Bayern Munich 3-1 in Munich. It was Bayern’s first home defeat of the season and meant Werder had won the championship with two games to spare.

Werder secured the ‘Double’ for the first time when beating second division side Alemannia Aachen 3-2 in the Cup final.

The 2003-2004 season will certainly not be remembered with any affection by the Bayern Munich fans. After a spirited but ultimately unsuccessful showing in both legs of their 2-1 aggregate loss to Real Madrid in the second round of the Champions League, the Bavarians failed in their last concerted bid to overhaul Werder in the championship race, besides being knocked out of the German Cup by Alemannia Aachen. Equally disturbing was the low quality of Bayern’s football and lack of spirit.

A campaign without trophies led to Ottmar Hitzfeld leaving the club to be replaced by Felix Magath, arriving from Stuttgart. No one could say the urbane Hitzfeld did not deliver during his tenure at the Olympiastadion. However Bayern were a great disappointment. Within days Hitzfeld was informed of his fate and negotiations were completed for Magath to arrive a year earlier than scheduled.

Camped in the top three virtually all season, Stuttgart’s 2-0 loss at Bayer Leverkusen on the final weekend of the campaign allowed their opponents to leapfrog them into the third Champions League qualifying spot. Bochum joined Stuttgart in the UEFA Cup.

The relegation quicksand finally pulled Koln, 1860 Munich and Eintracht Frankfurt under. Their places were taken by Nurnberg, Arminia Bielefeld and Mainz, the latter reaching the top flight for the first time.

Over the summer, Bayern splashed out £17 million on Leverkusen’s Brazilian centre-back Lucio, German international midfielder Torsten Frings (Dortmund), Bochum’s Iranian striker Vahid Hashemian and young 1860 Munich defender Andreas Gorlitz.The Bavarians’ transfer bill was twice what supposed big hitters Werder Bremen, Stuttgart, Dortmund, Leverkusen and Hertha Berlin spent on new signings between them.

The only other outfit keen to invest in personnel were Hamburg,who paid a total of £6.6 million for attackers Emile Mpenza and Benny Lauth as well as stopper Daniel Van Buyten.

Werder Bremen lined up a replacement for Ailton, who moved to Schalke in the close season, by signing national team striker Miroslav Klose from Kaiserslautern in a £3.3 million deal. Brazilian Ailton, league top scorer last season with 28 goals, was voted Footballer of the Year for 2003-04, the first time a foreigner has taken the award.

Matthias Sammer replaced Felix Magath as Stuttgart coach in the summer after parting company with Borussia Dortmund, heavily-endebted and deprived of European football, a sixth-place finish had no cause for celebrations. So there were no significant forays into the transfer market for the Dortmunder. Indeed, the order of the day has been savage wage cuts, reduced squad numbers and the sale of star players.

Schalke were the first Bundesliga club to axe their coach this season, firing Jupp Heynckes after his team lost three of their first four games.

Wolfsburg were one of the surprise early-season pacesetters in the Bundesliga, but the end of the year saw Bayern Munich regain top spot and go into the winter break as traditional ‘autumn champions’.

All three Bundesliga clubs made it to the knock-out phase of the UEFA Champions League while three other German teams, Schalke, Stuttgart and Aachen have also progressed in the Uefa Cup.

Nostalgia was certainly alive and well in Germany, where memories of West Germany’s first World Cup triumph have very much caught the public imagination. It is half a century since the legendary Sepp Herberger’s side came from 2-0 down to record a shock 3-2 victory over hot favourites Hungary in the final in Berne. But the commercial spin-offs have known no bounds in Germany this year. Commemorative books, magazines and watches have proved popular, replica 1954 shirts have been flying out of sports shops, while movie-goers have flocked to see Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Berne), based on a young boy’s hero-worship of Helmut Rahn, the right winger whose two goals helped upset the Mighty Magyars.

Fifty years after, Germany’s national team have slipped all the way back to square one, with the Deutscher Fussball Bund in confusion.

The German media had a field day following the national team’s 5-1 thumping by Romania in Bucharest earlier in the year. TV commentators and analysts competed with each other for the number of times they could utter the words ‘humiliation’, ‘embarassing’ and ‘catastrophe’. A performance of stunning ineptitude resulted in one of Germany’s worst reverses. For a once-proud footballing nation, the transformation from chosen few to unwanted has been too much to bear. Many were of the opinion that the Germans did better stay ay home and not travel to Portugal for the European Championships.

Indeed, his side’s inability to progress beyond the group stage of Euro 2004, prompted Rudi Voller to resign as national team coach, just two years after being serenaded by thousands of fans in Frankfurt for leading Germany to runners-up spot at the 2002 World Cup.

Voller’s immediate reaction to the 2-1 defeat by the Czech Republic that sealed Germany’s fate was to insist he would carry on. But within hours the defiance had evaporated. Voller was walking away. Ex-Bayern Munich coach Ottmar Hitzfeld was the overwhelming candidate to replace Voller, but surprised everybody by spurning the federation’s advances.

Public opinion was firmly set against ‘going foreign’ with Denmark’s Morten Olsen, and the media howled in derision at talk of an approach to Dutchman Louis Van Gaal.

Finally, Jurgen Klinsmann became the highly controversial choice. He arrived in Germany from the United States talking grandiosely of leading a 10-year root-and-branch revolution within German football and the DFB’s national team structure, although he finally only signed for two years. The DFB appointed Joachen Low as his coaching support and named Oliver Bierhoff to liaise between team and media and provide logistical assistance.

Klinsmann stated that the door will always be open for new faces and this he proved during several friendly matches Germany played during the later part of the year. The harsh truth is that not enough young German talent is coming through these days.

That said, Klinsmann has clearly began to impose his authority, ruffling more than a few feathers by dispensing with the services of long-serving national team supervisor Bernd Pfaff and opting to replace Oliver Kahn as captain with Michael Ballack. Klinsmann also intends to rotate his goalkeepers. That decision lead to the dismissal of Sepp Maier, the specialist coach with Bayern and the national team for publicly blasting the pretensions of Arsenal’s Jens Lehmann to be the country’s first-choice keeper prior to Germany’s October friendly in Iran. The German media were quick to conclude that the winds of change were blowing in the national team.

A change indeed, if significant enough, was that of the red shirt, worn for the first time by the German national team in the Leipzig friendly against Cameroon in November, after the German federation ditched the old green alternative to the normal white shirt in favour of red.

Klinsmann’s lack of coaching experience need not be an issue and the very positive results in friendlies, including the 1-1 draw against world champions Brazil in the second part of the year, confirm that Klinsmann has never been short on self confidence.

Everybody in Germany hopes that the national team can reflect the man.