Undaf.. from a factory worker to a deadly German substitute in the World Cup | sports

Stuttgart player Deniz Undav needed to play only two matches in the current edition of the World Cup finals, to transform from a mere substitute striker into a savior hero for the German national team, finding in this a compensation for the years of misery he lived through during his youth.

Ondav (29 years old) entered the match between Germany and Côte d’Ivoire in the second round of Group E at the 60th minute, with his country trailing by a goal, before he turned the tables and scored two goals, the first 8 minutes after his appearance and the other the winning goal in the fourth minute of stoppage time, giving his country a decisive victory in which it reached the round of 32 from the top of the group without needing the points of the third match.

In the first match against Curacao (7-1), substitute Undav also had a share in the German goal festival, scoring one goal and making two assists, contributing to 5 goals in two World Cup matches.

Undav is equivalent to a mile number

With this number, Ondaf equaled the achievement of Cameroonian Roger Milla, which he achieved in the 1990 World Cup, as the most influential substitute in the World Cup since 1966, according to what the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported.

Looking at these numbers, it can be said that Ondav (29 years old) has written one of the most surprising success stories with the German national team. A few years ago, he was still a player in the third division in Germany, according to the German magazine “Der Spiegel”, an age considered too late to start a major professional career.

According to the famous German magazine, Undaf lacks – in her opinion – the basic characteristics that are considered necessary in professional football, noting that he is a player who is “not fast and does not have an ideal athletic body,” before adding, “but he is a terrifying sniper in the opponent’s penalty area.”

Returning to his past as a teenage football player, when Jürgen Damsch, his coach in the SCV team competing in the U-19 regional division, remembers him, he immediately smiles.

Damesh said: “Undav was sometimes late for training because he was eating a sandwich, and he was not as committed to running training as we expected. He was naughty.”

He added: “He was 18 years old. I did not take him into account because of his physical abilities, and therefore I did not expect him to score goals for Germany in the World Cup.”

Damesh added: “Ondav was not a perfect athlete from a physical standpoint, but he had something special. Instead of dribbling from three players, he would hit the ball hard into the goal from the middle of the field because he saw the goalkeeper ahead. He would do crazy things.”

Even Undav himself recently joked: “I feel like I still have the same flaws I had 15 years ago, but I still know the way to goal.”

As for Deniz Dogan, who coached Undaf in the reserve team of Eintracht Braunschweig in 2018, he also confirmed that the player was not interested enough in his physical fitness, healthy nutrition or recovery with ice, but his real strength was his “quickness of mind” in making decisions on the field.

“Deniz was a natural decisive player, he read the game incredibly well, and he knew what was going to happen on the field before it happened,” Dogan said.

An unattainable dream

Before that, Werder Bremen refused to include Undav in their ranks at the age of 14 because he did not have the talent necessary to play professional football, as his scouts saw; Three years later, he had to work full-time in a factory, working hard 8-hour shifts, before going to training sessions with the fourth-tier team Havells, which paid him about 135 euros (about 146 dollars) per week.

Undaf said in a previous interview: “When they told me in Bremen that I had no place among them, my heart broke, but I did not give up hope.”

He added: “I left the family home at the age of 17 to sign with Havells, and there I combined playing, training, and working full-time, 8 hours a day operating a metal-cutting laser machine in a factory.”

He explained: “I would wake up at four in the morning and go to the factory, then to training before returning home around eight in the evening. I had to do this every day to be able to live. I could not survive on football alone.”

Undav moved to Belgian Union Saint-Geloise in 2020 and led them to the Premier League after scoring 25 goals, which opened the doors for him to move to Brighton.

After a season in the English Premier League, he was loaned to Stuttgart, which permanently annexed him in 2024. In the 2025-2026 season, Undav scored 19 goals in the German League, ranking second on the list of top scorers in the tournament behind English striker Harry Kane, Bayern Munich striker, to reserve his place in the “Manschaft” squad for the World Cup.

Undaf joins the German national team

Ondav played his first match with the “Manschaft” on March 23, 2024, when coach Julian Nagelsmann played him for 10 minutes against France in a friendly international match.

Since then, Ondav has appeared with Germany in 11 matches, during which he scored 9 goals and provided his teammates with 4 assists, according to data from the famous “Transfermarkt” website.

After starring in the first two matches of the 2026 World Cup, Nagelsmann was asked about the possibility of starting Undav in the third match of the group stage scheduled for next Thursday, and the coach replied: “This is possible. He participated twice and scored in both.”