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BERLIN - Their training ground is flanked by a cowshed and a petrol station. Until last season their stadium seated only 6300. Press conferences are held in a metal container and, until two years ago, they had but a single supporters' club, with a handful of members.
So, the rise of a team from the German village of Hoffenheim to the top of the Bundesliga, the country's elite football league, has amazed the nation.
Hoffenheim, population 3200, in the southwest state of Baden-Wurttemberg, is the smallest town to have had a team reach the Bundesliga.
Since the early 90s, the team have risen at astonishing speed through the eight tiers that make up the German football league. They remained in the second division for a single season before going up to join the elite in May.
Just over a week ago, Hoffenheim led the Bundesliga, above German giants such as Bayern Munich, Schalke 04 and Werder Bremen - before being unseated by Hamburg.
If they maintain their early season form, they will compete in the Champions League next season.
The village is in the middle of what promises to be a season-long party.
"I feel like I'm in a film, because everything that's happening seems so hard to believe," said butcher Erwin Hess, 41, who occasionally provides the players with their breakfast sausages.
"We never thought we'd reach the Bundesliga."
His 75-year-old family business sits amid the ponds, meadows and half-timbered houses that make up the picturesque village which until a few years ago was not even signposted from the main road.
When the team 1899 Hoffenheim started to get successful, people often mixed the town up with Hockenheim, the nearby motor-racing track. Once they do locate it, visitors find a happy hysteria has taken hold.
Bricklayer Heribert Breunig has painted the facade of his redbrick house in the blue and white colours of the club.
The Turkish kebab restaurant in the house where club owner Dietmar Hopp was born is festooned with the club'sinsignia.
Inside the stadium, the atmosphere is unusual, as if locals are unsure how to react to such extraordinary success. This, after all, is not Berlin or Munich.
"The mood in the stadium is like the atmosphere on a golf course," said Frank Enzenauer, football reporter for a regional newspaper, Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung. The number of supporters' clubs has risen to about 45. The most distant is in Australia, the most obscure has been formed by a club of academics that compares 1899 Hoffenheim's football style with the works of Immanuel Kant.
Their stunning success is thanks to a rarity in German football - a rich patron. Hopp has put about ¬120 million ($262 million) into the club over almost 20 years.
Hoffenheim-born and a former centre-forward in the youth team, Hopp founded software giant SAP and is now one of Germany's richest men. His involvement has led to charges that the team have had an unfair advantage - 1899 Hoffenheim have been nicknamed Germany's richest village team.
Envious fans of rival clubs express disapproval by singing Dire Straits' Money for Nothing and Who Wants to be a Millionaire? on match days.
Hopp, 68, has received death threats and said he would "only travel to away matches where my safety is guaranteed". He has been disparagingly referred to as Germany's Roman Abramovich.
It is a comparison Hoffenheim fans say is grossly unfair. Rather than investing in proven superstars, Hopp has been gradually putting the building blocks in place - bringing in better players, psychology coaches and celebrated coach Ralf Rangnick, with the club since 2006.
"It's Hoffenheim's luck that Hopp was not only born here and played for the club, but he made it his goal to help his hometown," said Thomas Schmitz-Gunther, president of Hoffenheim supporters' club Neckertal.
"You can't compare him to an oil sheikh or a vain oligarch. He doesn't drive around in a limousine or have bodyguards."
He is financing the building of a new 30,000-seat stadium outside the village.
MONEY MAN
* Dietmar Hopp, the owner of 1899 Hoffenheim, has put about ¬120 million into the club over almost 20 years.
* Hoffenheim-born and a former centre-forward in the youth team, Hopp founded software giant SAP and is now one of Germany's richest men.
* Hoffenheim, population 3200, in the southwest state of Baden-Wurttemberg, is the smallest town to have had a team make it to the Bundesliga.
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