James Callan, Guest Columnist
For a long time, Irish footballers going abroad usually meant one thing. England. Maybe Scotland. We weren’t exactly used to checking Bundesliga team sheets on a Saturday afternoon to see how one of our own was getting on.
That’s changing, and Alex Murphy is the latest to take the European route.
The 22-year-old Galwegian defender has left Newcastle United on loan for 1. FC Kaiserslautern. Four-time German champions, founding Bundesliga members and a club with plenty of history behind them. But for Murphy, the big thing now is getting the minutes.
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Not quite enough…
They finished sixth last season and have opened this one with two 0-0 draws against Wolfsburg and Karlsruhe, so nobody is getting carried away just yet. Murphy’s first taste of German football came in the cup away to WaldhofMannheim and it was hardly a gentle introduction. The game had pretty much everything by that stage, from crowd trouble and delays to extra time, and looked to be heading for penalties. Then Murphy found Ibrahim Kanaté just outside the box in the 120th minute. He still had plenty to do, but was given a little too much space and bent a brilliant right-footed effort into the top corner. First appearance, first assist and a derby won with almost the last kick of the game. You could do worse.
It’s probably exactly the sort of experience Murphy needs now. He left Galway United for Newcastle at 18 after breaking into senior football at Eamonn Deacy Park. Since then there have been Premier League appearances, a loan spell at Bolton and, this summer, a first senior Ireland call-up. Newcastle clearly rate him, but at 22 the conversation changes a bit. Training around Premier League players is great. At 22, he needs starts, minutes and the pressure that comes with playing for something every week.
There’ll be no shortage of pressure either. You don’t really understand the size of Kaiserslautern until you look at the crowds. More than 46,000 were turning up on average last season in a city with a population only a little above 100,000. The Fritz-Walter-Stadion dominates the place from the Betzenberg and the club’s history is everywhere you look.
Fritz Walter is still the name you can’t really get away from around Kaiserslautern. He captained West Germany to the 1954 World Cup and spent his whole career with the club. They had already won German titles in 1951, 1953 and 1991, but 1998 is the one that still gets brought up. Kaiserslautern had just come back up from the second tier and Otto Rehhagel somehow took them straight to the Bundesliga title. Nobody has done it since. It’s probably fair to say the bar has been set fairly high ever since.
They’ve also had enough years where those old stories were doing most of the heavy lifting.
Kaiserslautern were relegated from the Bundesliga in 2012, dropped into the third tier six years later and by 2020 the professional side had entered insolvency. Promotion back to Bundesliga 2 came in 2022, followed by a DFB-Pokal final two years later and sixth place last season. They’re not back in the Bundesliga yet, but they’re close enough for people around the Betzenberg to start looking up again. That’s the club Murphy has walked into.
Manager Torsten Lieberknecht knows the place well too. He played for Kaiserslautern himself and has already won promotion from this division elsewhere. Sporting director Marcel Klos highlighted Murphy’s ability to play centre-back or left-back, his comfort on the ball and his aggressive defending when the deal was announced.
The next few months are really about turning that versatility into starts.
From an Irish point of view, that’s probably why this one is worth keeping an eye on. Murphy could easily have taken another loan in England and become another Saturday score check. Instead, four years after Galway United, he’s at Kaiserslautern trying to play his part in getting one of Germany’s big old clubs back towards the Bundesliga.
If his debut is anything to go by, it might be worth keeping an eye on the German scores this season. And learning how to spell Kaiserslautern wouldn’t hurt either.
AROUND THE HEADLINES
Stephen Kenny fired up as Virgin confirm ‘live’ broadcast for Pats-Rovers top-of-the-table clash - Irish Mirror
Stephen Bradley on Hoops Euro exit: ‘We’ve given up too many soft goals in our European campaign and ultimately it’s cost us’ - extratime.com
Champions League draw: Troy Parrott’s Betis to take on Bayern and Arsenal - Irish Examiner
Daniel McDonnell: Making sense of the new National League — and why a drama-free start is vital - Irish Independent
Cambridge United sign Heffernan from Harrogate - BBC Sport
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