THIS WEEKEND WILL be extraordinary in Germany as Arminia Bielefeld will take part in the DFB Pokal final in Berlin. It has been the most remarkable run in the history of Germany’s cup competition as they are the first club from the 3.Liga to reach the championship game. Their journey has been remarkably difficult as it has required them to go through five teams, with the last four against Bundesliga teams. In the semifinal, Arminia Bielefeld defeated Bayer Leverkusen, the reigning Bundesliga Champions.

Now on Saturday, Arminia will face its final challenge in a VfB Stuttgart team that finished ninth in the Bundesliga and is in good form having won its last three games. Nearly all of Germany will be watching and pulling for underdog and hoping it can pull of an historic feat.

Front and center to this run is American midfielder Mael Corboz who is the captain for Arminia Bielefeld. Born in Alabama while his French parents studied and worked at the University of South Alabama, Corboz was raised in Somerset County, New Jersey where he developed as a player.

The sport runs strongly in the family. His father was a former player and played as high as the third tier in France. His sister Daphné Corboz won the Coupe de France earlier this month with Paris FC, which defeated Paris St. Germain in the final.

For Corboz, 30, his career has been anything but easy. After his collegiate career for both Rutgers and the University of Maryland, he signed a homegrown deal with the New York Red Bulls. But his first steps as a professional were ill-fated from the beginning.

 “I had high hopes for myself,” Corboz recalled. “I was like I've done well in college, I'm going to become an MLS player now. I signed a homegrown deal with Red Bull. They wanted me to play for the second team, and I have issues with the whole homegrown rights and stuff - ownership of players without doing anything with them. It's a disadvantage for a lot of players and it's something I suffered from because at the end of the day I would have loved to enter the draft and gone to a team that needed someone with my profile.”

“I showed up to Red Bull where they had a midfield that was unbelievable - backups were Sean Davis and Tyler Adams,” he continued. “They didn't need me. I had the feeling that they knew that. When they asked me to play for the second team and go on a second team contract, I said, I'm don't think I'm going to do that.”

After that, Corboz sought offers in the USL and found an opportunity with the Wilmington Hammerheads. What made the opportunity interesting is that the owner of the Hammerheads, who also founded a top youth club in New Jersey in the Cedar Stars, was a part owner of MSV Duisburg in Germany 2.Bundesliga.  For Corboz, he figured that if he could succeed with Wilmington, he could secure a trial at Duisburg.

Initially the plan worked, He performed well in USL and signed for Duisburg. But it soon became very difficult as minutes with Duisburg were nonexistent. After setbacks with the Red Bulls and Duisburg, Corboz began to question his career choices.

“Going to Germany, I knew the possibility of failure is always there, and you have to be okay with it,” Corboz reflected. “I knew that in going to Germany, the absolute worst-case scenario is you live there for two years, and you can talk about it the rest of your life. You lived there, learned the language. Stepping out of your comfort zone is something that has defined my career quite well, maybe even my life. Anytime something scares me or is difficult, you should probably go towards it and see what happens.”

“But in 2017, a year later, there was a moment where I was like, man, this is tough - two big setbacks early in a career,” he added. “You start thinking, is this right? Is it worth it? Somewhere I knew I had the quality to play at that level. It was more, is it worth it? This stuff hurts... And then I was like that would be too bad, I still have a lot to prove. So, I kept going.”

He pressed on. In January 2018 he signed for SG Wattenscheid 09 in the fourth-tier Regionalliga. It was a low level, but it allowed him to finally play. The following year, he moved up a level to play for Go Ahead Eagles in the Dutch second tier Eerste Divisie, where he narrowly missed out on promotion to the Eredivisie. And then in 2021 he moved back to Germany to sign with Verl in Germany’s 3.Liga.

Many soccer players have journeyman careers where they move from team to team, league to league, country to country for a paycheck. These types of careers tend to end with very little fanfare.

But what happened to Corboz is remarkable. In January 2024 he joined Arminia Bielefeld as the club was looking to restabilize after two consecutive relegations moved it down to the third tier. Later that year as he prepared for his first full season with the club in 2024/25, he was named captain when Fabian Klos, a beloved club legend, retired.

With Corboz wearing the armband, he flourished, and the team overachieved at every level.

“I got the armband from a guy who played at the club for 13 years who was an absolute legend,” Corboz said. “He couldn't even walk down the street without getting stopped. Looking back, it probably wasn't easy. I didn't really think about it. And I think that's a good thing. I didn't think about trying to fill his shoes. We're very different. I was captain at my old club and I had an idea of what I need to do with the team. It's like anything. You have to focus on your day to day and thing end up coming together and I think that has happened quite well this season.”

After a 14^th place finish in 2023/24, Arminia Bielefeld won the 3.Liga in 2024/25 to secure promotion to the 2.Bundesliga.

Then in the cup, the club began its miracle run with a win over Hannover in the 2.Bundesliga followed by four straight wins over Bundesliga opponents starting with Union Berlin and then through Freiburg, Werder Bremen, and then Bayer Leverkusen.

That then brings them to Saturday’s matchup against Stuttgart in Berlin. It will be the first time Arminia Bielefeld has had to play outside of its home stadium in the cup run, but they are expected to have a lot of support in the Olympic Stadium as their run has generated a lot of excitement in Germany.

“In those cup games, we have less pressure than in our league games, which is a weird thing to say, but that is the case. We have nothing to lose,” Corboz said. “In terms of mindset, you just have to go all in. Everything has to work out for you to win this game, so you don't even think about taking risks, you just do it. Sometimes this state of no-think is actually easier to play than when you feel pressure and think about the risk-taking and pros and cons of decisions.”

“Having said that, every round you think like, okay, this might be the end,” he continued. “Okay, we've beaten two. Next time we're going to get killed... Every time, somehow, you get into the game and you realize they're human beings too.”

This past week, Corboz has stepped into the media spotlight as he prepares to captain his team in the final. From having nearly walked away from the game in 2017 when his initial move to Germany seemed to have failed, he will now participate in a game that is bigger than what most professional American players could ever achieve in one of the world’s most prestigious domestic cup finals.

“To understand what is going to happen in Berlin - nobody has been in that situation,” Corboz said. “There's going to be a huge difference. We're used to playing in front of big crowds like 25,000 but 75,000 in that stadium is going to be different and it hits differently in the moment. It's something that's hard to prepare for. And then the whole build-up, being the cup final, all the press and media surrounding it before, the whole event - it's like a week-long event. Everyone knows everybody is watching, so you subconsciously behave differently, you play differently. I'm eager to see how everyone handles that. It's not going to be easy. There's a lot of unknowns for us.”

To make his story even more remarkable, his career has been on another level once he turned 30. Next season he will be in the 2.Bundesliga and perhaps even European play if everything goes Arminia Bielefeld’s way on Saturday.

For Corboz, he believes that being a late bloomer is simply due to answering hard questions of himself. Specifically, when he considered wrapping up his career he opted to not just keep going but to work even harder.

Now he gets to play in a major final.  

“I've never worked harder than in those two years after 2017 because I had something to prove,” Croboz said. “I think a lot of the times the guy who ends up doing well or who gets out of a sticky situation is just the guy who never gave up.”