At the moment I am in the centre of the game, but it would be good to stand back for a year and look at the whole business from a distance.”It is his more immediate future that has had everyone speculating, especially after his latest announcement. Yes, I will study all three.”Then, after a year, I will discover whether I want to explore new interests, or whether I can’t live without football. “I want to become good at computers, and also improve my languages.” Any in particular? “My French,” he says, before adding: “My Italian too, and I think my English still needs to improve. He and his American wife, Debbie, are expecting their first child this June and it seems apparent that when he finally hangs up his boots – internationally after the 1998 World Cup, and at club level a year or two later – Klinsmann will not be running a pub.”I will take a big step away from the game and study a couple of courses,” he says. “Of course my generation in Germany are not responsible for what happened 50 years ago, but we are responsible to make sure that it never happens again.”As I said, Jurgen Klinsmann is no ordinary footballer.

I grew up in Germany, and this happened because of my nation.”For a couple of hours, then, Klinsmann and company were not footballers mindful of the big game ahead, but ordinary people paying their respects? “Oh, totally,” he replies. We were shown the most horrific pictures, and it was explained to us what took place It was horrible to see, and I felt pretty bad afterwards. We have a lot of players in the German team right now who have many interests outside football, and we may never get another chance to play in Israel again.”We wanted to get an idea of how things are seen in Israel,” he continues “It was a very emotional experience for us all. “Even though we were based in Tel Aviv, our manager, Bertie Vogts, who’s very open-minded, agreed. Never mind the fact that he was clearly mulling over his eventual decision to announce on Tuesday that he would be leaving Bayern Munich at the end of the season, he was keen to get across his emotions on such a provocative occasion.
“The players and I asked if we could visit the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem,” he revealed within moments of greeting me. On the day we met at Bayern Munich’s training headquarters, the man who held aloft the European Championship trophy last summer at Wembley had just returned from a visit to Israel on international duty with Germany. It is true that modern novelists delight in having conversations with powerful works from the past, but Last Orders seems illuminated by no such conversation Ulysses was, at least, called Ulysses.

It is almost touching that we should have such faith in judges in the first place, but how many times must Graham Swift have been asked – this being the second most common question to novelists, after “Is it autobiographical?” – where he got the idea for Last Orders? How many times did it cross his mind to mention that he was a great admirer of As I Lay Dying, and that it had seemed a good wheeze to set the same story in Kent? How often did he feel those words swelling in his mouth, and swallow them. And when it emerged that the winner of last year’s Booker Prize, Graham Swift, had been inspired in his award-winning novel partly by a celebrated (but little read) work by Faulkner, we were quick to upbraid the judges for having failed to spot the connection. Even before Tuesday’s confirmation, stories have been appearing that Klinsmann wants to leave Germany, preferably returning to the Premiership where he made such an impact at Spurs.He admits his time at Bayern has been far from settled. “By December last year I had reached the end of my tether,” he says.