Richard, a coal miner from Essen, returns after eleven years of being a Soviet prisoner of war in Siberia. In the meantime, his wife, two sons, and one daughter have reached a minimum standard of living without him. When he is unexpectedly repatriated in 1954, he has severe problems in reintegrating himself with his family and country. His wife is running a small business, his elder son has become a Communist challenging his father's ideals of the Nazi time, his daughter flirts with British soldiers who are his former enemies, while his 11-year-old son Matthias, who never knew his father, admires a local football hero instead, Helmut Rahn of Rot-Weiß Essen. While Richard is initially very stern about Matthias' love for football, he gradually softens such that, on the night before the final game, father and son drive to Bern to see the match. An additional plot of the movie is the personal triumph of Helmut Rahn, for whom Matthias becomes a lucky mascot. Rahn, nicknamed "The Boss", has a successful record at club level, though is rarely chosen to play at national level in trainer Sepp Herberger's team. A third more light-hearted comic relief story line revolves around the fictional sports reporter Paul Ackermann and his wife, who travel to the World Cup despite their fundamentally different views on the importance of football. There are several miraculous events in the film. For Richard, it is the sudden joy of scoring a goal with an abandoned football. For Rahn, it is seeing Matthias on the sideline that spurs him into scoring the winning goal. For Sepp Herberger, however, the miracles are more mundane: the sudden rain that slows down the Hungarians, but not so much the Germans fitted with Adolf Dassler's revolutionary screw-in football studs. For all Germans, it's the unexpected euphoria of a win that heals many wounds, becoming a symbol of the ongoing economic "miracle".
The 1954 German team, captained by Fritz Walter and coached by Sepp Herberger, won the World Cup in a remarkable final against the legendary Hungarian Mighty Magyars, undefeated for four years. A determined Germany came back from an early two-goal deficit to win 3–2, with Helmut Rahn scoring the winning goal six minutes from the end of full-time. This was a euphoric event for Germany, which had been spiritually and economically shattered by the war. Winning the Jules Rimet Trophy by beating the world's strongest team gave the country new pride and is seen as a herald of Germany's economic and political recovery.
