Schweinsteiger

steigern - increase. The increase of the land. He's a pig breeder. There was me thinking about pig-sticking.

I see he gets jokingly called Schafsteiger (schaf = sheep).

I thought of pig-sticking too, with stecker somehow (jocularly?) becoming steiger.

Thanks. That makes sense.

This website* says it is derived from a village called Schweinsteig located near Rosenheim in Bavaria, so Schweinsteiger means "person from Schweinsteig".

"Steig" is middle high German and means sty in this context, so the village may owe its name to a pig sty located there.

*The website belongs to a public radio programme produced with the help of a linguistics professor specialising in the origin and meaning of names in Germany.

That also makes sense.

You are being polite, #3 looks rather more likely.

I am interested to see that in middle English "sty" was used with both the steigen (ascend) and steig (pen) meanings, which have separate etymologies. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sty

His nickname is Schweini. They seem to have nicknames in Germany alot, like Angie for Angela Merkel, Poldi for Lukas Podolski (also a football player), Schumi for Michael Schuhmacher etc.