It was in Aue, a small mountain town near the border with the Czech Republic, that Emil Forsberg fully understood he had got into something a little different. His debut for RB Leipzig had gone badly: they had not expected to lose 2-0 to the struggling local side Erzgebirge and they had certainly not banked on being pelted with snowballs by home supporters at full time, forcing them to run for the tunnel. In the stands two banners had compared his new club to “Nazis” and it was some way for a new arrival from Sweden to receive his first taste of life in Germany’s second tier.

“That’s maybe when I became a bit more aware that this club was hated here in Germany,” Forsberg says, specifically referencing those icy missiles. There are many who will never accept RB Leipzig’s existence and it stings all the more given that, in the five years since then, their momentum has been virtually unchecked. Forsberg is sitting in a classroom at the club’s training centre and hopes this will be the biggest half-season of his career. Julian Nagelsmann’s side sit second in the Bundesliga, a point behind Bayern Munich and a valid bet to win the title, and on Wednesday will face Tottenham in their first-ever Champions League round of 16 tie. Anyone who hoped they would be short-lived arrivistes is not going to get their way.

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“Some people like it, some people don’t, but what can we do?” he asks. “We’re here, we enjoy it, we don’t try and step on anyone’s feet.” When Forsberg came from Malmö in January 2015, at that point a 23-year-old winger who could have joined clubs with far headier reputations, eyebrows were raised back home and opinions followed accordingly. Forsberg admits he “had to Google it up” when he heard RB Leipzig, who had begun life as a fifth-division club only in 2009, were interested but he was quickly seduced by the persuasive power of Ralf Rangnick, who these days heads up Red Bull’s entire football department but back then was the sporting director of its Leipzig and Salzburg divisions.

“You just have to bow down,” Forsberg says of Rangnick, whose global network for spotting young talent is virtually peerless. “He’s a very emotional guy and it’s so easy to join in that emotion when he talks. He knows what he wants, wants everything correct in every small detail and that’s what I love about him, because this guy is never satisfied. That’s a big reason why the club is where it is today.”

Forsberg remembers training in a temporary facility when he first arrived, and being reminded to yell “achtung” upon turning on the shower because it would inflict an unpleasant temperature change upon others. It should not be taken as a sob story because little has ever been left to chance. Leipzig were promoted – with Rangnick in charge – during his first full season and only when they finished runners-up in their first Bundesliga campaign under Ralph Hasenhüttl did it ever really feel that they were ahead of schedule. Forsberg, moved centrally from out wide to unleash his creative potential, was in sensational form that year. “I was a good left winger but an even better No 10, it turned me into the right player,” he says, a statement borne out by the 22 assists that outdid anyone else in Europe’s top five leagues.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emil Forsberg, in action here against Hoffenheim, says: ‘I was a good left winger but an even better No 10.’ Photograph: Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images

“No one can say anything now,” he says of those in Sweden who chided him. “My career and the things I’ve done here speak for themselves.” Like Leipzig, he flattened out slightly after that exhilarating 2016-17 season, a series of groin problems not helping his form. It has become common practice to write off Forsberg, because he is now a 28-year-old in a club that valorise youth like few others. But he was instrumental to a first half of the present campaign that took Leipzig to the top of both the Bundesliga and their Champions League group, scoring eight times and thriving under the leadership of Nagelsmann.

“I think he made me better and made the team better: the right coach for the right club at the right time,” he says of the manager, who is only four years his senior. Nagelsmann has, by common consent, added a more technical element to the pressing game developed under Rangnick and Hasenhüttl. His training drills have a reputation for being complex but Forsberg has found his eyes opened anew at a relatively late stage.

“We have a few more combinations now, a few more solutions,” he says. “[Nagelsmann] has a thought about everything. There’s always a thought around it, and then you just have to do it. You’ll get a kind of lightbulb in your head like: ‘Ah, OK, so if I do that, that and that, this will open up and I can play that pass or that pass.’ It’s fun, even at this age, that you can learn something new.”

Forsberg’s father Leif – himself a storied former footballer with the hometown club they both represented, GIF Sundsvall – once said his son is “without a doubt the most boring player to interview”. It turns out that is not true; he converses readily and does not dodge a topic, even if a palpable guardedness tends to underpin his responses. There is only one question that prompts a pause of several seconds. The snowballs in Aue were far from the only occurrences of hostility from opposing crowds in his half-decade with Leipzig: a severed bull’s head was thrown near the pitch in a match at Dinamo Dresden in 2016 and, to give just one more recent example, Union Berlin’s fans began their meeting on this season’s opening day with a 15-minute silence.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emil Forsberg says: ‘If people want to try and stand in our way, we’re going to try and beat them.’ Photograph: Martin Jehnichen/The Guardian

Even if attitudes have softened in some quarters, there will always be those who never accept a Red Bull-owned club in a country where the stake held by supporters remains sacrosanct. It is perfectly reasonable for Forsberg not to agree with the opprobrium his club has faced but does he, at least, understand it?

“Everyone’s going to have an opinion on every little thing,” comes the reply, at length. “All we can do is go on our path and, if people want to try and stand in our way, we’re going to try and beat them – on the pitch, not off the pitch. We didn’t come up being all cocky, saying: ‘We’re going to be the best team in Germany now, now, now.’ We’ve taken it step by step; we have to stay humble and keep focused.

“I can feel that it’s going in the right direction now. I think more and more people feel with us, and see we do the right thing here. We’re not here to buy Neymar, Mbappé and Messi. We’re here to buy young players, develop them, play football and have fun. I think people can recognise themselves in that.”

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To understand Forsberg, and particularly his imperviousness to background noise, it is worth hearing how heavily his surname weighed while he was coming through at GIF Sundsvall. Leif was a club legend and his grandfather, Lennart, was also a player there. Sundsvall is a small town and people would talk. “When I came up to the first team, everyone said it was because of my dad,” he says. “That just gave me more motivation to play even better and I think I showed everyone I was there to stay. It’s like this when you have a parent who’s a bit famous, and you have to deal with it. I always had a strong will and was sure I was going to make it.”

He did, even if there was a dalliance with floorball after football coaches expressed doubts about his size. Now he is supremely comfortable in his own skin. “I could see myself playing anywhere; not to brag, but I feel I have the qualities,” he says. Liverpool were previously linked with a move and perhaps they, or other Premier League clubs, might be tempted this summer given that Forsberg has found it hard to get back into Nagelsmann’s starting XI since a cold laid him low during the winter break.

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There is every chance he will be trusted at White Hart Lane though: Forsberg scored Leipzig’s first-ever Champions League goal and has been on target three times in this season’s edition, including two against Benfica in an injury-time comeback. Perhaps, particularly given Spurs’ mediocre form, he and his gang of upstarts should be favourites to reach the last eight.

“No, no, no!” he protests. “Not if you look at the team Tottenham have: fantastic players, a fantastic coach and a fantastic stadium. We have a chance, of course, but we will have to be at 100% and to get every decision right.”

The concern for Spurs, and for whose who would wish RB Leipzig away, is that they tend to do exactly that.