Zuzenhausen

Ask anyone around the Häuselgrund pitch who FC 1920 Zuzenhausen wants to beat most, and the answer comes back the same: VfB Eppingen. The two sides sit close enough in the Kraichgau that their meetings carry their own name, the Kraichgau-Derby, and league schedulers know to put it near the start of the season.

The club plays in the shadow of a bigger neighbour without belonging to it. TSG 1899 Hoffenheim keeps its headquarters and training grounds in the same village, and money from the Dietmar-Hopp-Stiftung paid for the ground FC Zuzenhausen now calls home, the Akademie-Arena — 3,000 standing places at the Häuselgrund sports complex. The club itself, though, has stayed its own thing, working its way up and down the lower reaches of Baden football on its own terms.

That climb has been slow. Two Bezirksliga titles, in 1989 and 1993, stood as the high points for three decades until 2023/24, when Zuzenhausen won the Verbandsliga Baden for the first time and went up to the Oberliga. The stay lasted one season; relegation sent the club back down, and 2025/26 finds it again in the Verbandsliga. A year earlier it had gone as far as the semi-final of the Landespokal Baden before FC-Astoria Walldorf ended the run.

Players have passed through and gone further. Christoph Hemlein came up through the youth side before a Bundesliga career at VfB Stuttgart. Michael Rechner kept goal here in 2008/09 and later worked as goalkeeping coach at Hoffenheim and Bayern Munich. Xaver Zembrod played and coached at the club around 2000, before becoming a familiar assistant on Bundesliga touchlines at Hannover 96, Bayer Leverkusen, RB Leipzig, Bayern Munich and Eintracht Frankfurt.

None of it existed before 1920, when Stefan Welz and Fritz Wolpfert put the club together in the village, green and white from the start.