He was the A-League's player of the season in 2012-13, and the Kiwi says he can take his game to a new level in Germany

The reigning A-League player of the season has the worst car in the lot. "There's a few nice cars here, and then there's mine," he jokes. Welcome to Stuttgart, Marco Rojas: birthplace of the Porsche and the Mercedes Benz; gateway to the Black Forest; and home to one of Germany's biggest football clubs.

Rojas hasn't exactly hit the ground running at his new club, and not just because of a fractured bone in his foot. One month he's winning the Johnny Warren Medal and leading the scorers list at Melbourne Victory. The next, he's being coached in a language he doesn't understand and wondering when he'll get a game in a league which has a pretty strong claim on being the best in the world. The Kiwi is built like a schoolboy, and he is going through something akin to a first week in high school experience all over again. But he was never expecting to just burst onto the Bundesliga scene.

"They, like me, realise that it is a long-term – or hopefully it is – a long term prospect. I mean, I've signed here for four years, so it's not like I was going to come here and straight away get going and carry on the way that it had been.

"It's been a little bit different, but this is where I've always wanted to be. It's another level here, being over here in Europe and I would have been silly to have thought that I would have come in and just slotted straight in and everything would have kept going as it was.

"It's a process and I'm starting the next step to develop as a player here, and I think that I've picked a good place to come and do it."

The 21-year-old attracted interest from the likes of Liverpool and Juventus, but as with so many of the A-League's rising stars, he was attracted to the Bundesliga. The former Socceroo coach Pim Verbeek's once said it was better to be training in Germany than playing in the A-League. But the verdict is still out on what Germany will do for this crop of players.

Robbie Kruse is beginning to make a name for himself after his move from Melbourne Victory. He helped Fortuna Dusseldorf earn a promotion, and was involved in more goals than any of his team-mates the following season. He now finds himself at Bayer Leverkusen, where he is being used regularly off the bench. Days after an outing to Old Trafford, he nailed two first-half goals in his debut start for the club.

It's been slower going for his compatriots, though. At Borussia Dortmund, ex-Victory goalkeeper Mitch Langerak has won titles and been part of a Champions League final, though most weeks he finds himself on the bench. His team-mate Mustafa Amini arrived from the Central Coast to much tabloid fanfare, thanks to his big red afro, but is playing with the Dortmund reserves in the third division.

Mathew Leckie, once of Adelaide United, came to Germany on a ticket from another big name club, Borussia Moenchengladbach, but has been relegated to the second division. At FSV Frankfurt, he plays alongside Nikita Rukavytsya, a member of the Socceroos 2010 World Squad and once a crucial player at Hertha Berlin. Leckie, it must be said, is having a far better time of it – a first choice player who is notching up goals, as opposed to a rarely used sub.

"For me, I think it is really very important to be playing games, no matter where you are," says Rojas. "But obviously over here in Europe is where everyone wants to be. You ask people where they'd like to play football if they had the choice, they'd say over here in some of these countries. It's difficult, it depends on your own opinion, but personally I think that you need to be playing games to develop as a player."

When he returns at full-pace to training this week, Rojas will be taking orders from a different coach – Thomas Schneider – to the one who wooed him in the off-season. With the new coach, has come a change of fortunes at Stuttgart. After a disastrous opening to the season, which saw them lose their first three matches and crash out of the Europa League at the play-off stage, they have turned into a major domestic force. Schneider's tenure is barely a month old, but he's already snared 6-2 and 4-0 victories.

A new coach can also spell doom for his predecessor's young signings, but Rojas seems content with the change.

"I feel fine. I feel confident in what I can do. I know that there isn't much I could have done about what's happened to my foot. I'm at peace with myself [and] I have confidence in myself that I'll be able to show my full potential and hopefully I can get my chance to prove it."

How long that will take, he's not sure. "I just take it day by day. At the moment with my foot, it's difficult to say. Once I think I can get through a whole week, or a whole two weeks of training without pain or without having to take any precautions during training, then I think I'll have the base of training to be able to push on. Then after that, it depends on the coach."

"I have to work hard and it takes time, but I have the time here ... I'll take that time to prepare myself and to get myself into the best possible shape that I can, so that when I start playing or when I get the chance to, I can do the best that I can."

As for his vehicular situation, there's no need to worry Mrs Rojas – your son isn't driving around in a second-hand Trabi. "We get looked after pretty well."