Oliver Kahn Century and Best Goalkeeper of the Past 25 Years elections. From 1994 to 2006, Kahn was part of the German national team, in which he played as a starter after the retirement of Andreas Köpke; he was an unused member of the squad that won the 1996 UEFA European Championship. In the 2002 FIFA World Cup, although Germany was not among the tournament favourites, Kahn's prowess in goal was key to reaching the final, where Germany lost 0–2 to Brazil and Kahn made a mistake on Brazil's first goal, nonetheless he received the Golden Ball as player of the tournament.
Forever Country won the Grammy Award for Best Music Video for Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood" at the 58th Annual Grammy Awards – and solicited his opinion about whether there were any country songs which he would like to do. Kahn began to think about different possible songs but felt that the choices were too limited in terms of trying to get the entire history of country music into one song. So he pitched the CMA board the idea of doing a mash-up of three different songs, so that one would get more of a breadth of the history. Kahn then came up