‘‘I began to play football very early. There was a pitch next to where I lived, and I went there every day after kindergarten.’’

‘‘Most of the time I was alone outside because I grew up around my mother and two sisters and had a lot of free time.’’

‘‘I wanted to be a professional footballer since I could think. Since I could imagine. It was always this way in my head. It was the only way I could go.’’

-Kevin Schade

The first stadium Kevin Schade ever knew had no stands and no floodlights, only a stretch of rough ground outside his front door in Potsdam, where the city melts into the suburbs of Berlin. His mother carried the household on her own, raising her son beside his sisters, and the boy spent his days outdoors, kicking a ball until the light gave out. The only shirts that mattered were the ones his grandfather kept sending, Ballack and Schweinsteiger kits that swamped a child with no idea where the game would take him.


Football claimed him at six, when Babelsberg welcomed him into their youth ranks, and he repaid them with goals by the bagful, around thirty in a season. At twelve came the first real sacrifice. Energie Cottbus offered a place in its academy, and the price was a boarding-house bed far from his mother's kitchen. Four years on, the distance stretched further: Freiburg, a country's width away from Brandenburg, a southern club that practised calm and common sense, where a teenager could stumble without being thrown away.