Oberneuland

Julian Brandt and Karim Bellarabi learned the game in Oberneuland's colours, red and white, long before either pulled on the shirt of a Bundesliga club or of Germany. The academy that produced them sits in a quiet district on the eastern edge of Bremen, and the club's history since reads like two very different clubs joined at the middle.

FC Oberneuland was founded on 13 April 1948, agreed over drinks at the Zum Dorfkrug restaurant by locals who wanted a team of their own. For decades that was enough: a district side working its way up through the Bremen league pyramid. Then, across the 1990s, the promotions came one after another, from Kreisliga A all the way to the Oberliga, and by 2008 Oberneuland had climbed into the Regionalliga Nord, the third tier of German football. That same season brought a run in the DFB-Pokal, in which they knocked out TuS Koblenz.

The high point came in 2010, when the club signed Ailton, a former Bundesliga top scorer, by then well past the level the transfer suggested but still a name that belonged to a bigger stage. Three years later the club went bankrupt. The results of the 2012/13 season were struck from the record, and Oberneuland dropped first to the Landesliga, then further still, down to the Bezirksliga, the seventh tier.

The recovery was slow and largely local: a Bremen-Liga title in 2020, another in 2023, and ten Bremer Pokal wins along the way, the most recent also in 2023. Home games are now played at the brz-Arena, holding 2,250 on the same ground where the climb once started — not far from where the conversation in the Dorfkrug set it all in motion in 1948.