Life is not a home game

The success story of the TSG 1899 Hoffenheim football club has truly turned the Bundesliga on its head. The club and its sponsor, billionaire Dietmar Hopp, have not only made friends with the well-calculated promotion.

"Das Leben ist kein Heimspiel" documents Hoffenheim's rise to the top of the 1st Bundesliga, but it is still not a pure football film. Even those who have no idea about the round leather and the rules of the Bundesliga, like the author of these lines, can enjoy this entertaining documentary. For even more than the players and the action in the various stadiums, managing director Jochen A. Rotthaus, the fans from the very beginning and the residents of Hoffenheim are the focus of the action.

Over a period of three years, filmmakers Frank Marten Pfeiffer and Rouven Rech accompanied Rotthaus and his team and recorded how the club grew from an amateur club to a successful Bundesliga club and thus to an economically lucrative enterprise in a very short time. The efforts Rotthaus has made to achieve this goal do not always make him seem likeable. But his very special manner definitely has a high entertainment value. For example, when he drives through the festively decorated town shortly before Hoffenheim's promotion to the first Bundesliga, enthusiastically taking note of the many flags, banners and pennants, only to remark as a conclusion: "There could have been more - they just don't have the guts yet".

But Torro, chairman of the first Hoffenheim fan club, and his comrades-in-arms also provide quite a few amusing moments - especially when they refuse to celebrate their club's promotion not in the cosy clubhouse but with the "new" fans in a large hall. This scene also shows how well edited the documentary is, as the contrast between the two parties is just wonderfully portrayed.

"Life is not a home game"but it's not just a fun, entertaining documentary, it's also a very interesting document about a large-scale and very bold economic venture. Whether or not you think Hoffnheim deserves to be able to claim this unbelievable success as its own - it doesn't change the high entertainment value of this documentary. Worth seeing - alone already, because you experience here in a very pretty scene finally once, what football players buy themselves so everything for the way to a play at food supply.

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp