Not a tongue-twister, rather the title of this post is the wholly imagined story of a middling German club mired in financial scandal. This is the football headline the dormant sub-editor inside me would love to be able to coin one day so I could boast my own personal ‘SupercaleygoballisticCelticareatrocious’ moment.

Were the corruption story to rumble on with influential and connected people further drawn into the murky affair, my follow-up headline could be ‘Kickers Conspiracy’. You see that’s not as pithy because it relies on the reader knowing The Fall’s musical canon.

If Kickers Offenbach brought in a respected athletics coach tasked with rapidly improving the squad’s fitness, you could run with the headline: ‘You can’t get fitter than quick-fix Kickers’. That’s a questionable one too as although it’s snappy enough, it depends on people recognising a decades-old British ad campaign for a car repair company.

I like how Kickers Offenbach could be one of the small band of clubs able to preserve their name even after a merger with another German club – Stuttgart Kickers Offenbach has something of a ring to it, don’t you think? You’ve probably guessed by now that wordplay is the best we’ve got to offer on Kickers Offenbach, a club that will only mean something in a football sense to Bundesliga followers of a certain vintage. Here’s a quick and condensed history.

Kickers’ glory years started with a shock DFB-Pokal win in 1970 as a second tier club, then followed up with a succession of respectable Bundesliga mid-table finishes through to the middle of the decade. Rudi Voller started his career with the club as did Siggi Held and Jimmy Hartwig. There’s no question as to the most eye-catching result in Kickers Offenbach’s modern history: a resounding 6-0 hammering of European champions Bayern Munich on the opening day of the 1974-75 season.

This post originally appeared on the BTLM Facebook page where we regularly post original retro football material. Do stop by if you have a chance.