Niklas Süle & Roberto Firmino: Hoffenheim's unlikely pairing

Two futures, one German club

It is easy to forget, amid the Bundesliga titles and Champions League medals that followed, that Niklas Süle and Roberto Firmino were once teammates at a small, unglamorous Bundesliga outfit in the Rhine-Neckar region. Süle is a name forever tied to Bayern Munich's dominance of the late 2010s; Firmino is inseparable from Jürgen Klopp's Liverpool and the Anfield cult of 'Bobby'. But before either of those stories began, both were learning their trade at Hoffenheim.

Firmino had arrived in Germany back in December 2010, a teenager from Alagoas signed after his form at Figueirense. By the time the 2013-14 season kicked off, he had already weathered a rocky spell, he was dropped from the first team in late 2011 for showing up late to training, and was starting to show the touch, vision and pressing intensity that would later define him in England. Süle, five years younger, was a converted academy product who had made only fleeting appearances before that campaign, including two relegation-playoff appearances the previous year as Hoffenheim scraped survival against Kaiserslautern.

The season that made them both

In 2013-14, the breakthroughs arrived simultaneously. Firmino finished the campaign tied as the Bundesliga's fourth-highest scorer with 16 goals in 33 games, a return that earned him the league's Breakthrough Player award and alerted clubs across Europe, Lokomotiv Moscow had already tried to prise him away with a €12 million bid the previous summer. Süle, meanwhile, established himself as a genuine first-team regular for the first time, playing 25 Bundesliga matches and scoring four goals as Hoffenheim finished ninth. Neither man was yet the player he would become, but both were unmistakably on their way.

Their paths diverged from there, though not without one more crossing. Firmino left for Liverpool in the summer of 2015, while Süle stayed on at Hoffenheim for two more years, surviving a torn ACL and establishing himself as one of the Bundesliga's most promising defenders before Bayern Munich came calling in 2017. Remarkably, in August of that earlier season, Firmino, by then a Liverpool player, scored against his former club in a Champions League play-off, with Liverpool winning 6-3 on aggregate against the Hoffenheim side Süle was still part of.

Different clubs, same foundation

What makes this pairing worth remembering isn't any dressing-room anecdote, there's no record of one here, but the shape of two careers that would scatter in opposite directions from a shared starting point. Süle became a five-time Bundesliga champion and Champions League winner with Bayern, later moving to Borussia Dortmund. Firmino became a Premier League and Champions League champion with Liverpool, later playing in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and is now the highest-scoring Brazilian in Premier League history.

Neither man's legacy sits naturally alongside the other's. One is remembered as a Bayern defensive stalwart, the other as the heartbeat of Klopp's front three. But for one Bundesliga season, both wore Hoffenheim blue and white, and both used it as the launchpad for everything that followed.