The number of times a newly promoted club has won the Bundesliga. It was Kaiserslautern, in 1998, and it has not happened again.
Down first
Kaiserslautern had been in the Bundesliga since it began in 1963. In 1996 they finished bottom and went down, the first relegation in the club's history, and they went down in the same season they won the German cup.
They spent one year in the second division and came back up as champions of it.
The manager
Otto Rehhagel had spent fourteen years at Werder Bremen and won the league there. In 1995 he went to Bayern Munich and lasted less than a season.
He took the Kaiserslautern job in the second division. Most people read it as a step down for a manager whose reputation had just been damaged.
The season
The first match back in the Bundesliga was away at Bayern Munich, the reigning champions and the club that had dismissed him. Kaiserslautern won one nil.
From the fourth matchday they were top of the table and they stayed there to the end. They finished two points ahead of Bayern.
The squad was not expensive. Michael Ballack, then twenty one, played his first Bundesliga seasons in it.
What it means
Promotion and a title in consecutive seasons is not a thing that happens in football, because the gap between the divisions is the whole point of having divisions.
It has happened once in Germany. Leicester City did something comparable in England eighteen years later, but Leicester had been in the Premier League for two seasons by then.
Afterwards
Kaiserslautern reached the quarter-finals of the Champions League the following year. The club later fell into financial trouble and dropped through the divisions, spending years in the third tier.
The 1998 title is still the last one they won.