Angelo Stiller is the midfield glue holding Stuttgart's team together this season

The young Germany international has been thrust into a senior role in Sebastian Hoeneß's team this season. And seems to be thriving under the pressure.

Watching Stuttgart can stir up all sorts of emotions or memories for many football fans, but for me this season’s iteration of the Swabian giants often brings back glancing references to the 1993 animated film “Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers”. The Oscar winning animated movie remains a beloved part of British cinema history because of its humour and the signature innocence of the two main characters - an old man and his dog - but what keeps popping into my head when I watch Sebastian Hoeneß’s team this season is the climatic finale to the film that was once described by director Danny Boyle as "one of the greatest action sequences I’ve ever seen." 

You can watch the scene here, but the most dramatic moment of the sequence comes when Gromit, the trusty dog, is in hot pursuit of the evil penguin (obviously) and suddenly runs out of tracks, so has to quickly improvise by laying a new train line as he’s riding along. Suffice to say, among a wonderful action scene, this glancing moment has stuck in my head for more than 30 years as the perfect example of someone or something making it up as they go along. And in many ways, that’s how Stuttgart seem to be getting from one game to the next this season. 

That, of course, is hardly by design. Like most clubs, Stuttgart’s fate and prospect of silverware remains at the whim of the transfer market and in the summer the club lost the spine of its team, as Hiroki Ito departed for Bayern Munich, while Borussia Dortmund swooped in for Waldemar Anton and Serhou Guirassy. To the club’s credit, they reinvested the €67 million they raised in transfer fees straight back into the squad, allowing Hoeneß to buy a number of forwards and defenders to replace the ones that he’d built his previous team around. Not to mention the necessary permanent signing of Deniz Undav.