Happy Monday everyone! It’s everyone’s favorite weekend-destroyer day again. Thanks, Monday!

Yesterday, the World Cup of Soccer came to its logical conclusion as Germany of course won the trophy, as they tend to do.

Today, I decided to dedicate our Monday post to analyzing whether the team’s nominal make-up might have contributed to their success. Theorizing that the more amusingly named a team’s players are, the greater success they should be able to reach.

Let us break down the winning squad then.

Goalkeepers

Manuel Neuer, Roman Weidenfeller, Ron-Robert Zieler

Here we have a promising start. A double-barreled first name with some nice R- rhyming in Ron-Robert, a typically German 12-letter last name in Weidenfeller that probably means something like “fly swatter” or “banana peeler”. And then the actual number one goalie Manuel Neuer, whose name is pretty milquetoast, unless you consider stealing a T from somewhere and inserting it mischievously into his name, creating the name Manuel Neuter, which is a bit better. Neuer, in spite of having perhaps the least amusing name of these three, won the tournament’s best goalkeeper award, so the name perhaps did not contribute.

Schürrle is not joking. And don’t call him Shirley.

Defenders

Kevin Großkreutz
Matthias Ginter
Benedikt Höwedes
Mats Hummels
Erik Durm
Philipp Lahm
Per Mertesacker
Jerome Boateng
Shkodran Mustafi

Bingo! There we go. This is why Germany had one of the best defences in the World Cup. All those lovely names.

Per Mertesacker is no sucker back there, and there is nothing lame about Philipp Lahm. Especially with that second p to cap off his Philipp. Matthias Ginter is a doozy. I’m considering making Shkodran one of my future 64 names. Mats Hummels is a German classic. And there’s nothing to complain about in the rather professorial sounding Benedikt Höwedes either.

Moving on to the attackers and midfielders, where we find some truly good ones.

Sami Khedira
Bastian Schweinsteiger
Mesut Özil
Andre Schürrle
Lukas Podolski
Thomas Müller
Julian Draxler
Toni Kroos
Mario Götze
Christoph Kramer
Miroslav Klose

They call Bastian Schweinsteiger “Schweini”, which is just an adorable nickname. He seems to like it.

An imposing group of names here. We start with the most German sounding name ever, Bastian Schweinsteiger, which you can say at any volume and it will sound funny. Julian Draxler is a soccer player, but with that name he might have had a great career as a Bond villain as well. Miroslav Klose has the name that inspired a thousand puns, so perhaps it’s better they won and didn’t end up falling short and coming “so Klose”. And look at all those umlauts. If umlauts win you trophies, this team will never lose.

In the final judgement, this team was certainly not hindered by their names.  Although, if a World Cup was decided solely by basis of funnynameology, there would be little standing in the way of Ivory Coast claiming the trophy. Check out their squad!