If not easily, but relatively quickly, the German national football team cleared the first mandatory hurdle at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and with some help from Curaçao, they advanced from the group stage as group winners. After the Germans were stuck in the group at the last two World Cups, Julian Nagelsmann’s team can certainly breathe a sigh of relief.
Very smoothly against Curaçao, They won 7-1but had to suffer on Saturday night the victory against Ivory Coast. The African team took the lead, then Deniz Undav needed a double to win, the second decisive goal was scored in the 95th minute.
Undav was only a substitute in Germany’s first World Cup match, replacing Jamal Musiala in the 64th minute, and scored shortly after. The situation was similar on Saturday, against the Ivory Coast, when he replaced Musiala in the 60th minute, and eight minutes later he scored his first goal. We can rightly say that Undav is the miracle replacement of the German team: so far, he has 3 goals in less than an hour of playing time, which puts him in a tie with Lionel Messi and Canada’s Jonathan David for leading the scoring list. (True, Messi has only played one match, he will next play against Austria on Monday at 7 pm Hungarian time.)
He also has two assists in the match against Curaçao, that is, he has played a role in 5 goals in the German team so far in 56 minutes.
The now 29-year-old Undav joined the German national team relatively late, in 2024. He was in the squad nominated for the 2024 European Championship, but he did not get many opportunities – he came on for the last 6 minutes against us, he was not sent to the field in any other match.
Deniz Undav’s second goal against Ivory Coast – Photo by Mathew Tsang / Icon Sportswire / Getty Images
But it wasn’t just his national team career that got off to a difficult start. At the age of 17, he was a semi-professional player for Havelse, near Hannover, in the German fourth division. Besides sports, he worked in a factory as a machine operator. Not by chance: when he was 14 years old, he was told by Werder Bremen’s youth team that he was too small and therefore would never become a regular player. As a child, Thierry Henry and the Brazilian Ronaldo looking at his goals he longed to become a star himself, so it is no wonder that he later said that he was heartbroken when he was rejected from Werder. “I got up at around 4 in the morning, went to the factory, then went to training and got home around 8 in the evening, and then it all started again the next day. I had to take this job to make a living because I couldn’t live on the money from football alone,” he recalled.
In addition to factory work, he did not give up on becoming a professional footballer. By 2018, he had already managed to get promoted to the German third division, to the Meppen team, and then in 2020 he became a player for the Belgian Union Saint-Gilloise, with whom he was promoted from the Belgian second division. In two seasons, he scored 45 goals in 70 games for Belgium, which already brought the breakthrough and he was transferred to the Premier League, Brighton, for the 2022-23 season. He didn’t find his way here, there were no goals, so he first went on loan and then finally to VfB Stuttgart. In the last season, he came second in the top scorer competition, with 19 Bundesliga goals, only Harry Kane could do more, although he represented a completely different category with his 36 goals.
Nagelsmann, however, still prefers him as a substitute and puts Kai Havertz in the starting team instead. He also spoke about the dilemma after the match against Ivory Coast, explaining that at the moment he thinks it’s better if Undav comes on at the end of the match, because he adds his own in the opening phase. “Every player wants to be in the starting team, but I think he is still satisfied because he played an important role and we are also satisfied with his performance” – he said Nagelsmann about the game-deciding striker.
The German captain was not always so happy with Undav, a few months before the World Cup, he openly criticized the forward in March, despite the fact that he came on as a substitute in the warm-up match against Ghana and scored the winning goal in the 88th minute. Nagelsmann he highlightedthat he only hit the ball once until the goal, and although of course the best strikers know that they are in the right place at the right time, he was not sure that he would have been able to score the winning goal even after 70 runs.
Two months later, in the friendly match between Germany and Finland played as a warm-up to the World Cup, Undav was a starter and scored two goals, so if the need or Nagelsmann’s decision makes it so, he can flash not only as a substitute.
And what he is capable of is clearly shown by how well he performs in the German team under Nagelsmann. So far, he has scored 9 goals in 11 matches and also has 3 assists. In 11 games, he spent a total of 398 minutes on the field for the German national team, during which time he was involved in 12 goals (either as a goal scorer or as an assist), which means that he – somehow – delivers a goal every 33 minutes.
Germany will next play as a sure group winner against Ecuador on Thursday, June 25 at 10:00 p.m. Hungarian time.
