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"Coach, player, model, tour guide. I hope the chairman hears about all this." In the grand tradition of the career overseas footballer Dietmar Hamann has the kind of accent that can range promiscuously from Liverpudlian to native Bavarian in the course of a single sentence. Posing for pictures in front of the vast empty banks of seating at Stadium MK, home of the club he now serves as player-coach, he slips automatically into scouse when the time comes to crack a joke or two. Hamann, 37, is five months into his career at MK Dons, his fourth English club, or fifth if you count a single day at Bolton before having a change of heart in June 2006.
While the cynic, or the Wimbledon FC loyalist, may point out that vast empty banks of seating would be a fair enough description of the Stadium MK experience at three o'clock today when Hamann takes to the pitch for the visit of fellow League One mid-tablers Dagenham & Redbridge, this is still a club that throbs with upwardly mobile ambition. Hamann is the third high-end former Premier League player to pass through in the past two years. Paul Ince and Roberto di Matteo both went on to coach in the top flight.
Hamann, currently in the process of completing his coaching badges, is open about his own ambitions. "One day I want to manage a football club," he says. "I need to get more experience. But one day I would like to take over and manage somewhere."
For now he is enjoying his role as part of a triumvirate of coaches working under Karl Robinson, at 30 the youngest manager in the Football League. In many ways Robinson's mix-and-match backroom staff of Hamann, the former England assistant coach John Gorman and former Scotland player Alex Rae fits in neatly at what still feels a club-in-progress. Stadium MK is still oddly indistinguishable in texture from the Ikea megastore with which it shares a plot, its main entrance reminiscent of the marketing suite of a rather swish new suburban residential development. "The chairman [Pete Winkelman] has got a vision of how he wants things to be," Hamann says. "This is an up-and-coming club. He's got a project. I'm part of that and we all want to make it successful long-term and see this club in the Premier League one day."
This is not just lip service. For all the murkiness of the Dons' genesis out of the relocated corpse of their parent club, Wimbledon, surely no club in the country courts its community more energetically. The entire site gurgles coaching groups, tours and community projects (while I'm waiting for Hamann a blind man in a replica shirt wanders into reception behind his guide dog and deadpans: "I hear you're looking for a new striker".
If Hamann is sold on the pioneering MK spirit, this is still a man whose heart will always belong to Liverpool, the club he left in 2006 after seven successful seasons. "Every time I go back it feels like going home," he says. "It will always be my favourite club and the club where I feel I belong."
The Champions League victory in Istanbul remains a career high point, a match in which Hamann's introduction at half-time coincided with Liverpool clawing back a three-goal deficit. He scored Liverpool's first penalty in the shoot-out with what was later diagnosed as a broken right foot ("we'd already made our changes so I didn't even really think about it"
"It has been really painful. The new stadium hasn't been built and all the things the owners have promised they haven't produced. It's just a really bad time for the fans because the team has struggled over the last 15 months and it felt like the owners didn't have any interest in the club bar financial interests. But hopefully with this new owner he's saying all the right things, so fingers crossed."
Hamann's loyalty springs in part from his status as a member of the first generation of footballing imports to have spent almost all of their active careers in England. Originally from the small Bavarian town of Waldsassen, he joined Bayern Munich as a junior and made his first-team debut aged 20 while still on an amateur contract with the club. During these early years at Bayern he was groomed by Giovanni Trapattoni who, Hamann says, "more or less taught me the game, how to play and what to do, how to play in midfield. He was a really major figure for me."
After playing for Germany at the 1998 World Cup, Hamann had a single season at Newcastle before moving to Liverpool for £8m, where he would win two FA Cups, the Champions League, Uefa Cup and League Cup. Most of this success came under Gérard Houllier, another major influence on his own coaching ambitions. "I spoke to Gérard only last week. It is really good to see him back with Aston Villa. Villa have a very talented squad and as manager he is just what they need to get the most out of those players.
"He [Houllier] is definitely underrated in this country. People talk about the players he bought who didn't perform at Liverpool but he also bought Sami Hyppia for £2.5m and built a team in 12 months that was capable of winning trophies. He used to be a teacher, so he's very good at communicating with people and creating team spirit. You saw that in how many finals we played and won even when we were under the cosh for a lot of the time. We won the Champions League after he left and so many of the players were his signings. He deserves credit for the team he left behind."
Medal hauls aside, it was during his time at Liverpool that Hamann also found himself assimilated by the domestic football culture. "I do feel English as a footballer. I've spent most of my career here, so I know a lot more about the English game now than I do about the German game. Fifteen-year-old kids in Germany don't know who I am. The only ones stopping me in the street are grandfathers and grandmothers."
Hamann played 62 times for Germany during an international career that spanned both the low point of the early 2000s and the start of the current German renaissance, something Hamann puts down to the amount of money spent on player academies since 2004. He is fairly magnanimous regarding Germany's thrashing of England in the first knockout stage of the World Cup in South Africa.
"It's not all bad in England but I just think they've stuck with the same players for too long. Why didn't Adam Johnson go to the World Cup? If you look at the team, they're all very good players but they've been to a few tournaments now and didn't perform, so I was a bit disappointed with the players Fabio Capello took. He stuck to the old guard."
As part of a youthful coaching set-up at an ersatz football club that has its gaze set firmly on promotion to the Championship this season, Hamann is perhaps right to take a punk-ish approach to the notion of an old guard. And with or without the Dons, it is hard to imagine he will not be back, stalking the touchline in one capacity or another, at an even higher level before long.
