As Tinchy Stryder tops the charts and Manchester United celebrate a third Premier League win in a row, a new club is formed in Germany after a buyout of fifth-tier SSV Markranstadt.
Fast forward 11 years and RB Leipzig have – incredibly – reached the last four of the Champions League.
Shorn of main star Timo Werner before the resumption of the competition, Leipzig came up against the experienced and accomplished Atletico Madrid – and deservedly beat them.
Now they face Paris St-Germain – Neymar, Mbappe et al. Can they go all the way?
“I’m perhaps one of the happiest coaches in the world,” coach Julian Nagelsmann said in the aftermath of the famous win against Diego Simeone’s side.
Like everything surrounding the club, Nagelsmann is young. At just 33 he has already shone with two Bundesliga sides and has long been touted for even bigger things.
“This club develops very fast,” he added.
“We reached the Bundesliga and qualified for the Champions League three times. We’re still in the Champions League. The progress is faster than usual.”
It certainly is. It took just seven years for the club to reach the Bundesliga. Four more to go this far. At the Estadio da Luz on Tuesday, the new boys will be in the unusual position of making PSG – 50 years old on Wednesday – feel like the establishment.
The meteoric ascent is shared by individuals at the club too. Two weeks before RB Leipzig’s birth, goalkeeper Peter Gulacsi was ending a loan spell rock bottom of League One as he was relegated with Hereford.
It’s unlikely he would have envisaged facing a £400m strikeforce in a Champions League semi-final as he fished goals out of his net from the likes of Bas Savage, Lloyd Owusu, Billy Paynter and Paul Hayes at the wrong end of the third tier of English football.
Such was Atleti’s poverty of ambition, the Hungarian only actually had to make two saves in Lisbon – but he was a calming presence throughout.
Elsewhere in the team, captain Yussuf Poulsen joined the club in the third tier and Marcel Sabitzer, creator of the opening goal, played with them in the second division. There is history within the ranks, even if that is relative.
