Success in the club, failure in the DFB team: Joshua Kimmich and his unfinished business with the World Cup

Almost exactly a year has passed since Kimmich played his 100th international match – as the 14th player in the 125-year history of the German Football Association. He has now moved into the top ten, has left Franz Beckenbauer behind him and will pass Jürgen Klinsmann this Sunday, in the test against Finland in Mainz (8.45 p.m., live on ZDF), with his 109th appearance for the national team.

The FC Bayern Munich professional already has a unique selling point among all the legends of German football. One thing, however, that he would gladly do without. Joshua Kimmich is the only German footballer with more than 100 international matches who has never won the World Cup. In just over two weeks, he will make his third attempt to change that.

In his first two World Cup participations, Kimmich never made it past the preliminary round. How much this unfortunate result gnawed at him and scratched his self-image as a winner was visible live and in color in December 2022 – when Kimmich was interviewed on television immediately after the worthless 4-2 win in the last group game against Costa Rica at the World Cup in Qatar.

“Today is the most difficult day of my career for me,” he said at the time. “I joined the national team in 2016. Before that, Germany was always in the semi-finals. Then we were eliminated twice in the preliminary round and last year in the European Championship round of 16. That’s not so easy to cope with because I’m personally associated with the failure. You don’t want to stand for that.”

As a child, Kimmich said on Friday in Herzogenaurach, he reenacted the World Cup tournaments with his best friend and sang the national anthem in his own garden. But this great love has so far remained unrequited.

One could even say that Joshua Kimmich, now 31 years old, still has a score to settle with the World Cup. “This is a new opportunity, a new possibility,” he said, referring to the upcoming World Cup in North America.

In the middle of this week, the national team met in Franconia to prepare. You can tell that everyone is hot and hungry and pushing themselves extremely hard, reported Kimmich. As always, of course, this applies above all to himself.

When goalkeeper Alexander Nübel used a brilliant reflex to prevent his team from conceding a goal during the first training session in Herzogenaurach, the captain clenched his fist and shouted his joy. “Yeah!” he shouted.

The experiences have made him cautious

Kimmich took part in a World Cup for the first time in Russia in 2018. Shortly before the then world champion’s opening match, he sat in the quarters in Watutinki and talked about his teammate Timo Werner, whom he had known since their youth days at VfB Stuttgart. Actually, he said, they used to win every tournament. The subliminal message was that Kimmich apparently expected nothing else for the World Cup. Things then turned out slightly differently.

Kimmich knows nothing other than success from the club. However, the unpleasant tournament experiences with the national team made him cautious. “We all know what the last tournaments were like. I know that myself. We shouldn’t take that into the tournament,” he said. “It’s important that we have the mindset that we can beat anyone. That’s always possible in one day.”

This time the Germans are not among the clear favorites for the World Cup title. The national team may have won the last seven games, but the greats of world football were not among the opponents. On the contrary. The last games against Portugal and France (both in the Nations League) and against Spain (at the 2024 European Championship) were all lost.

“I have the feeling that everyone in our squad knows what they can do and what they can’t do and what they have to bring in to make it successful,” said Kimmich. “That’s definitely a big plus compared to the previous World Championships. We always had the feeling that we were better than we are, talked a lot about potential, but didn’t get it on the pitch.”

Speaking a little less and doing a little more is what the captain recommends for the World Cup. “Then we can win a few games.”