Giovanni Habel Kuefner

Samoan father, German mother, born in New Zealand, and selected by Germany at twenty-nine.

Giovanni Habel-Kuefner, who spells it Habel-Küffner, was born in Auckland to a Samoan father and a German mother from Heidelberg. He played age-grade rugby for Samoa and, at 29, was selected by Germany.

Back-row forward at Bayonne, 1.96m and 105kg, born on 9 January 1995.

He started at six in New Zealand, and would have started a year earlier had his mother not wanted him to play football. He arrived at the Pau academy in 2015 intending to stay one season and see what French rugby was like. He stayed seven years.

His first match came in the Challenge Cup against Castres in January 2016 and his first professional contract in 2017. His first Top 14 try came in a 37-28 win over Clermont in 2019-20, and he reached the inaugural Supersevens final with Pau in February 2020, losing to Racing 92. He became a full starter in 2020-21. In all he played 67 league matches for Pau, 44 of them starts, and 23 in Europe, scoring ten tries.

Stade Français signed him in 2022. He started the first five rounds and played 23 league matches in his first season there.

Two incidents are on the record. In February 2019, while at Pau, he received a two-month suspended prison sentence and a 1,000-euro fine for insulting police officers and resisting being taken to the station, after a night out the previous December; he admitted the facts and apologised at a guilty-plea hearing. In November 2023 he was one of ten Stade Français players and staff who broke a club curfew after a defeat at Pau, and La République des Pyrénées reported that he struck a member of the Pau staff. His club stood him down until 17 December 2023.

Bayonne signed him on three years in June 2024.

The French Barbarians picked him against Tonga at Gerland in November 2021, in the same 42-17 win that featured Félix Lambey.