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Pub Team Bids For Glory

Germany's Worst Football Team Gaining Fame

German amateur football club 1. FC Germania Forchheim is getting more media coverage than ever before in its 100-year history as it lurches from one spectacular defeat to another. Now its chairman hopes its terrible performances will actually start attracting crowds and a sponsor.

German amateur football team 1. FC Germania Forchheim has had a difficult start to the new season, conceding 166 goals in its first seven matches and failing to score even once, a tally that has earned it the title of Germany's worst football team.

Nevertheless, Lothar Walenta, the chairman of this 100-year-old Bavarian club, is pleased with his boys. "I'm proud of them. They've rescued the club," he told Express newspaper.

The coach and 26 players of Germania Forchheim, which competes in a regional Bavarian league, walked out last year after the club ran into financial problems and couldn't pay their modest match premiums. That's when a local pub team decided to help out the club in an unlikely bid for glory.

"The boys have never played for a club before, they're as fit as you'd expect a pub team to be -- which means completely untrained," said Walenta.

Their new coach Manfred Rehm, 54, is the landlord of the club's bar and chases the new footballers up and down the pitch three times a week. "The morale among my boys is great!" Rehm told Rheinische Post newspaper. "They fight to the last minute."

Walenta now hopes that the media interest in Forchheim's spectacular defeats -- its worst so far was a 0-34 drubbing a few weeks ago -- will attract curious spectators and maybe even a new sponsor.

"In the last matches we almost scored a goal, " said Walenta, "The shot went just over the crossbar several times." Asked what will happen if and when Germania Forchheim scores its first goal of the season, he said: "We'll celebrate that like a victory."

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