The six men have temporary asylum status, meaning that during the first three months of their stay they cannot leave the area without asking permission from the German authorities. Jaddou had to first seek official approval to train three evenings a week in Ravensburg, 30 miles away.

There is little to do. The six cook with one another and go for walks. Zakaria spends hours breaking open cigarettes to remove the tobacco and rolling the contents into thinner smokes. “Tobacco is very, very expensive here,” he explained.

Jaddou grew up in Latakia, “the most beautiful city in the world,” he said with pride. By the time he was 8, his talent had been spotted by his local club, Hutteen, which plays in the Syrian Premier League. His performances there earned him a call-up to Syria’s national youth system.

“I stopped giving my school much importance and only cared about playing football,” he said of the brief few years he remembers playing soccer before the civil war began. “I loved football more than I loved my parents.”

As the war began to engulf the country, soccer was increasingly hard to play. Though the Syrian Premier League has managed to continue, FIFA ruled that Syria was too dangerous to host international games. Youth players like Jaddou had to travel from the coast to Damascus along a dangerous stretch of road.

He said that his team bus had been attacked twice and that rebel forces had also threatened him for representing a national team that was seen as aligned with President Bashar al-Assad. (Jaddou’s description of events could not be independently verified by The New York Times.)