When Helmut Schoen was first playing the game in his native Dresden his footballing hero was the Paperman, Austria's Mattias Sindelar, an integral part of Austria's Wunderteam. As one of the World's great players of those times with Scotland's Alex Jackson and Uruguay's Isabelino Gradin it was not a bad choice. The era was the second half of the 1920s and Schoen, born in 1915, was entering and then in his early teens playing for the junior team, Dresdensia, before at sixteen in 1932 he moved up to the senior game with Dresden SC. However, in the meantime we know that through his footballing-life and -psyche had already passed a figure, who was clearly to have a important impact on the top-flight player, who would emerge, we have his own word for that, and albeit more subliminally on his future, much lauded management career. The figure was the Anglo-Irishman, Jimmy Hogan, the towering, football-coaching figure of Central European football in the first half of the 20th Century, notably directly with regard to the Austria national team, the Wunderteam itself , more indirectly but equally recognised with Hungary and, I suggest, also with Germany, initially West and then Germany United.

On the face of it such a claim might seem hard to justify. When Hogan was in Dresden, then working effectively as the German FA's Chief Coach and their paths would have crossed, Schoen was aged between twelve and fifteen. Yet it must also be recognised as an impressionable age, enough for Schoen later in life to state that he considered him,

"the shining example of the coaching profession",

some accolade from a man, who himself in 1974 was to win a World Cup, having been runner-up to England in 1966 and take a third place in 1970 plus win a European Championship in 1972 and be runner-up in 1976. In comparison Hogan was to be a part of the coaching team that took Switzerland to the silver medal at the 1924 Paris Olympics and saw Aston Villa promoted from the English Second- to its First-Division in 1938. But that was it.

Yet, not only did the apparently far more successful coach/manager sing the praises of the one, who was less so, there may be evidence that he did so because he not only recognised that his greater success incorporated the standard and principles Hogan set but that German football in general did so too. Indeed, had he lived to see it, Schoen dying in 1996, there might also have been recognition by extension that at the modern Liverpool F.C., itself hardly a stranger to historical Scottish influence, and certain other clubs those standards and principles sublimely continue.

Helmut Schoen made his debut for the Dresden SC first-team in 1932. He was twenty-two, a forward with a quick turn, good technique, tactical awareness and a powerful header. There for twelve seasons he played  alongside centre-forward and German international, Richard Hoffmann, signed to the club in 1927 and by none other than Jimmy Hogan. Schoen would in 1937 also become a German international and play sixteen times for his country despite the war, at the end of which he was thirty, continuing club football until 1951 and the age of thirty-six.

So far, so good, however, on retirement from playing Schoen's conventional path had become anything but. The war had left him an East German. Football seems to have facilitated a move to the West. He managed a club for one brief season and that whilst he also managed the "national" team of the Saarland before it was integrated into larger Germany once more. He then served as assistant to West German team manager, Sepp Herberger,  at the 1958 World Cup and elimination to Sweden in the semi-finals and 1962 and elimination at the quarter-final stage. He then took over as manager in 1964 and begun to implement changes. One of the first was the somewhat controversial inclusion of Sepp Meier as goalkeeper. Another was selection in mid-field of Franz Beckenbauer and alongside him in the attacking role, Wolfgang Overath. And it was this attacking mid-field player that he was to continue in the major competitions of 1970, still with Overath, in 1972 with the, if anything, more attacking contemporary, Gunter Netzer, with an ageing Overath again in 1974 and for whom he failed to find completely adequate replacements in 1976 and 1978.     

But it is this concept of the attacking mid-fielder itself that is interesting. It is an iteration of a Hogan idea, also incorporated both into the Wunderteam in the form of an attacking centre-half, essentially the Scottish attacking centre-half, Leopold Hofmann being one, and in Hogan's successful Aston Villa team of 1937-38, there in the form of Bob Iverson. And it is this same attacking centre-half/midfielder that might be said to be still essence of the roles at today's Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool performed by Thiago, Keita and perhaps above all Firmino, all of whom noticeably came to Merseyside from German clubs. It might even be argued that, whilst after Overath Schoen failed to fill the void left by inevitable aging, his assistant, the carrier of the philosophy, Jupp Derwall, briefly did so with Bernd Schuster before they fell out, after Dervall for a decade and half more it was in the feet of Lothar Matteus and then was epitomised by Michael Ballack into this century and the current generation of German managers. And it