🇩🇪 After two decades of crisis and calamity, Kaiserslautern are back in the big time

Die Roten Teufel will face Bayer Leverkusen in Saturday's DFB Pokal final!

For a certain vintage of football fan, the name ‘Kaiserslautern’ is evocative of a particular era of the sport.

In the late 1990s, Die Roten Teufel won the Bundesliga title twice with their latest triumph coming in 1998 - when Otto Rehhagel’s team remarkably won the championship in a promotion season.

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As recently as 2004, Kaiserslautern were a regular fixture in European football, playing in the UEFA Cup and spearheaded by a promising young striker by the name of Miroslav Klose.

With relegation in 2007, though, the club from southwest Germany entered a period of exile - from the Bundesliga and relevance. The four years spent in the third division between 2018 and 2022 was a nadir.

This season’s unexpected run to the final of the DFB Pokal, however, has shone the spotlight on Kaiserslautern again.

The sight of Kaiserslautern lining up against Bayer Leverkusen at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium on Saturday will highlight the club’s potential and how its demise should never have happened.