“He himself has said that he was not the best footballer, although he did score four in a game once,” Kurt says. “He always hoped Mainz would get promoted to the Bundesliga but it never happened until he was manager. He tells us that sometimes he is a dreamer when it comes to football. He always says that he is so happy that his hobby also happens to be his job.”

As a teenager, Jürgen would occasionally go to Stuttgart, the nearest big city to Glatten, to watch the club he supported, VfB Stuttgart, although it was playing rather than watching with which he was preoccupied. He once had a trial at VfB but was not asked back. “Those kind of setbacks built his character,” Kurt says.

Norbert was also a promising footballer, a goalkeeper who played for Kaiserslautern’s junior teams and grew up in the austerity of post-war West Germany earning money when a teenager as a feintaschner – making bags and wallets out of leather.

Elisabeth’s family were from Glatten and in the past owned the local Schwanenbräu brewery which, like many small independents in modern Germany, have been swallowed up by the major names.