Well, it felt like such a good idea at the time — when the Europa League football fixtures were announced my ten-year-old, Ezra, and I scoured them for an interesting away game featuring our team. Wouldn’t it be fun and even cultured to travel to the Continent to watch them play? People pick cities to visit based on concerts or exhibitions, so why not do the same to take in a match? Tottenham Hotspur have in their squad Mikey Moore, rated so highly by Michael McIntyre — a fellow Spurs fan — that he thinks the 17-year-old might actually change the sport. Exciting times.
The options? Ferencvaros in Budapest, but that was ruled out because of a family event. Then there was Galatasaray in Istanbul, but they call that stadium “hell”, so it’s not ideal for a young lad. Third up was Rangers, but Glasgow was too close to home. So, TSG 1899 Hoffenheim it was, for a bonding weekend in a random part of southwest Germany to cheer on our brave boys and their head coach, “Big Ange” Postecoglou.
L, L, D, L, W, W, L, L. That had been our form in all competitions leading up to the game against Hoffenheim, who play in the town of Sinsheim. We’d had a rash of injuries, sure, but the atmosphere at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium had turned sour. It was tense, the fans were revolting — yet what else could we do other than set an alarm for 5.30am on a Thursday, head to Heathrow, nod sadly at the other Spurs supporters at the terminal and catch our flight to Frankfurt?
Jonathan and Ezra watching Spurs take on Hoffenheim
However, football was only ever going to be one part of this trip. Ezra remains just on the right side of that line where excitement comes with simply doing something different. He is on the cusp of being a teenager after all, and I want to capture this moment before he gets too old. He loves watching football live, but he still gets excited by planes too — at his age, when a steward hands you a mediocre apple juice at 8am you think that it’s a second Christmas. And so, surrounded by fearful fans shelling out hundreds of pounds to see a collapsing team, he was a joy to be with.
Also, it turns out there is a lot to see in the Rhein-Neckar-Kreis region of Germany. For various reasons, Hoffenheim’s stadium is in a Sinsheim industrial estate, but amid the sprawling factories, fast-food joints, trucker stops and a gigantic car wash stands a rather extraordinary transport museum, the lush pool complex Thermen & Badewelt Sinsheim (adults only, alas, apart from Saturdays) and a state-of-the-art museum about climate change.
“I’m actually looking forward to the transport museum more than the game,” Ezra said as we took trains from Frankfurt to Mannheim then on to Neckargemund and Sinsheim — which was totally fair, given that we’d just lost to Everton.
Sinsheim is located in southwest Germany, with a population of fewer than 40,000 people
ARMIN BARTH
We stayed in Hotel Sinsheim — a modern, bright hotel with few frills but a decent buffet breakfast (B&B doubles from £106; hotel-sinsheim.de). The stadium is a short walk from there and, to get the football out of the way, we won! What a feeling. And we loved the experience: first, the hilarity of Ezra — used to the ultra-modern ticket scanners at Spurs — being baffled by the old-school turnstiles; then the rows of sausages as the sole snack on offer. And the atmosphere was fun and warm — maybe it helps that fans drink beer at their leisure on the terraces as opposed to binge-drinking pints at half-time, as is the case at Premier League games.
The next morning we walked to the Technik Museum Sinsheim — the transport museum, claimed by its owners to be the largest on Earth, if you include the collection at its sister museum in Speyer. The former hosts a cluttered sprawl of planes, cars, military vehicles, bikes and creepy mannequins. We spent three hours there, losing ourselves in an Air France Concorde and a hall of army paraphernalia so large that we couldn’t make it to the end of war. There were unique touches throughout, such as planes raised on stilts with slides for children, a jet aircraft controlled by a lever and even an Imax cinema that, for some reason, was showing a beautiful film about coral reefs (£25; sinsheim.technik-museum.de).
The transport museum in Sinsheim is the largest in the world
SEBASTIAN SCHNEPPER
After a quick salad buffet lunch in the museum — to satisfy Ezra’s mother that we weren’t just eating chips — we walked towards Klima Arena, the interactive climate-change centre, incongruously standing in an industrial town with a world-beating gas-guzzling museum but the sort of place that could persuade anybody to give up their car. Indeed, with hindsight, we should have looked into hiring bikes, because travelling to Sinsheim by train results in a lot of strolling next to busy roads. At one point, for a breather, we took posed band-like photos by a heavily graffitied tunnel — who needs Greece?
Klima Arena, though, is worth, er, driving to. I’ve never been anywhere like it. Opened in 2019 it is a slick, entertaining and educational hub that everywhere else should copy. Its aim is to warn us about damages to the planet, but it never feels preachy. Most impressive was a globe, the size of a shed, that spins and changes its surface depending on your input on a control pad. You can see population density, cloud cover or what might happen to coasts in 50 years — spoiler, it’s bad news.
Ezra was transfixed. His generation learns about climate change but usually in a sombre way. My favourite part was a supermarket game in which high scores are achieved by picking the most sustainable, local, seasonal food (more fun than that sounds). Ezra’s favourite? A human hamster wheel that he powered up to win a token to drive an electric car (adults £8, children £5; klima-arena.de).
The Klima Arena is an educational hub as well as a football stadium
ALAMY
Our final couple of days were spent in Heidelberg, a gorgeous city half an hour’s drive from Sinsheim that according to TSG 1899 Hoffenheim’s Instagram page is the must-see attraction in, erm, Sinsheim. That’s harsh on the museums we visited, but Heidelberg remains essential.
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We took a city tour and I thought that Ezra had switched off, as children do, but over dinner he asked me about the stories we’d been told of bakers being dipped into the Neckar River for making irregular pretzels and students held in prison for crimes such as peeing in the street. The cobbled streets of the old town bustled, even in late January; Heidelberg has a lot of American visitors because it represents the Europe they imagine — quaint and medieval.
We stayed at Hip Hotel, a strange yet fun and cosy place in which every room is themed around a different place. So, yes, “Havana”, for example, has a huge mural of Che Guevara, while “Zermatt”, where we stayed, is decked out like a chalet, with wood panelling and photos of mountains; in “Down Under” everything is upside down, with the bed appearing to be standing on the ceiling and (room-only doubles from £109; dehip.hip-hotel.de).
Heidelberg has a quaint, medieval feel
ALAMY
The real highlight, though, was dinner. Sinsheim was not exactly packed with places to eat and drink — though the traditional Germanic restaurant s’Badische had a sizeable, tender schnitzel (mains from £14; sbadische.de). Heidelberg, on the other hand, is crammed with restaurants, cafés and bars. Ezra and I went to Vetter’s on Steingasse, where — over hours of convivial atmosphere, jokes with other diners and rounds of the strategy card game Skyjo — the point of this trip became clear (mains from £7; brauhaus-vetter.de).
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To wildly stereotype, it is said that men do not talk to each other as much as they should, but football forces them to talk — there is the travelling and that part around the 55th minute of a match when it can be rather dull. And over dinner, for the entire trip really, Ezra just kept talking, about trees that look like dogs, his friends, really quite a lot about the videogame Zelda, books, runaway trains, why he wants the swearing filter taken off his Spotify, why he suddenly doesn’t like bananas …
It was three days of this — conversations that we would not have shared if we didn’t support a particular football club. And on the train back to the airport, as he told me in great detail about a monkey mask in Heidelberg that had something to do with embarrassment, I knew that while you cannot always depend on your team to win, you can rely on the things that loving the sport can bring.
As we watched Spurs lose to Leicester City on my phone while waiting to board our flight home, Ezra asked whether we could go to the Europa League final in Bilbao on May 21. I said maybe, but Spurs might not be playing in it. And yet, a few months on, with only an eminently winnable semi-final against the Norwegian side Bodo/Glimt standing in our way, could we? Perhaps we should start thinking about packing our bags again.
Jonathan Dean was a guest of the German National Tourist Office (germany.travel). Fly to Frankfurt
Have you followed a sports team to a particularly memorable place? Let us know in the comments