José Holebas

Having been born in West Germany, Holebas was eligible to represent the Germany national football team and through his Greek and African-American heritage was also eligible to represent Greece or the United States in international football. He never appeared for any of the countries at youth level. In an interview about his international ambitions with a Greek reporter, he stated, "My dream growing up was to play for Germany, but my father is Greek so I would be happy to play for Greece." In November 2011, he received Greek citizenship as "Iosif Cholevas," and on the 11th of the same month, he officially made his debut for Greece in a friendly match against Russia, which ended in a 1–1 draw at the Georgios Karaiskakis Stadium in Piraeus.

In 2012, Holebas was part of Greece's 23-man squad for the UEFA Euro 2012 finals held in Poland and Ukraine. He started the first two group games against Poland in a 1–1 draw and against Czech Republic in a 2–1 loss and was dropped for the third match due to heavy criticism that his attacking tendency was becoming hazardous to the usually-solid defensive tactics of Greece. Nonetheless, he did come on for the final 30 minutes of the match, playing admirably and assisting Greece in holding on to the 1–0 win against Russia, which took them to the quarter-finals. Here, however, Greece fell to Germany by a score of 4–2, a defeat in which Holebas picked up a suspension for receiving another yellow card after his previous booking in the game…

Early years

Holebas' first club was local youth team Südring, which he joined in 1992 when he was eight. He played at non-professional youth football teams in German football which included playing for Südring, FC Kleinwallstadt and TSV Teutonia Obernau until 2001, when his girlfriend got pregnant and Holebas, at age 18, decided to temporarily give up football. He had to work the double shift as a warehouse assistant in order to financially support his family. A year later, in 2002 and with the guidance of his German-American uncle, Alfonso, whom Holebas described as his "second father" and stated that he was the person who "gave [him] the kicks [he] needed to get [his] life back on track," helped him begin playing football again. He played for local German youth side Aschaffenburg-Damm from 2002 to 2005.

Viktoria Kahl

In 2005, Holebas joined German sixth-tier club FC Viktoria Köln in the Landesliga Bayern-Nordwest. Under then-manager Antonio Abbruzzese, he was mainly deployed as a striker and scored 15 goals in 33 appearances and finished among Landesliga's top scorers.

1860 Munich

After prominent performances as a striker for Viktoria Köln, 1860 Munich scouts observed the left-back, and later approached him and Holebas joined the club in the summer of 2006. In his first season in Munich, Holebas was in 1860's second team, where, at 22 years of age, he was considered "too old" by the club's then-youth academy coach, Ernst Tanner. Holebas…

José Lloyd Holebas (né Cholevas) was born on 27 June 1984 in Aschaffenburg, West Germany, to a Greek father, Achilles, from Vasiliki, Trikala, and a German-American mother, Lowis. Achilles left the family not long after he was born and José was raised only by his mother and her family.

At the age of 18, Holebas became the father to a daughter. In 2011, he married Diana Jäger, a German woman who also hails from Aschaffenburg. Holebas speaks his native language of German and English fluently and although he does not speak much Greek, he understands it adequately. He is a Roman Catholic Christian.