DMax Eberl’s voice faltered as he sat down on the podium in the Mönchengladbach press room on Friday afternoon to explain a rather surprising turn of events. The sports director has asked for his contract to be terminated immediately because he is “tired” and “exhausted” because he feels that his work is making him increasingly “sick”, he reported, formulating a few sentences that every listener under the skin had to go.
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“I just want out, I just don’t want anything to do with football, I don’t want anything to do with you guys,” he said to the journalists’ faces. “I want to see the world, have no responsibility, just be Max Eberl. That’s why I made this incredibly difficult decision at an incredibly inopportune time.” Tears flowed, despair in his words as he announced, “I’m ending what was my life. I’m finishing something that gave me a lot of joy and fun because football is my life, because football is my joy.”
All attempts by the Presidium to convince the 48-year-old from Lower Bavaria to stay at least until the end of the season were unsuccessful. “That was not possible due to the state of health,” said Vice President Rainer Bonhof, who, like most club employees and supporters, is “very sad” about the loss that marks the end of an era.
“We respected that, didn’t accept it, we’re sad, we didn’t expect that,” said President Rolf Königs. Eberl had worked for Borussia Mönchengladbach since 1999, first as a player, then as youth director, and from 2008 as sports director. Especially the sweet time full of success and joy over the past ten years is closely linked to Eberl.
“It’s about the people”
After being prevented from relegation in 2011 in the relegation, the Gladbachers always reached a single-digit place in the table, played four times in the Europa League, three times in the Champions League and brought on players like Marco Reus, Granit Xhaka, Marc-Andre ter Stegen, Thorgan Hazard and Dante out. Experts have voted Eberl the transfer market king of the Bundesliga several times.
Over the years he has actually always seemed very stable and seemed to be absorbed in his work. Although Eberl first reported to the Executive Committee in October that he wanted to take a longer break, everything went on as usual because he didn’t show anything in everyday life. But now Eberl could no longer. “I can understand when people say how can he do it now. But it’s not about football right now, it’s about the people,” he said.
Rumors that the official, who was repeatedly courted by other clubs, is leaving Borussia in order to soon take on a possibly more interesting post are probably fictitious. Rather, Eberl suggested that such speculation, which can be invasive and hurtful, helped cause the exhaustion. Most recently, there was speculation about the importance of Eberl’s relationship with a club employee for the sporting decline. “Each of us has family, children, grandparents, friends,” he said, wishing “that the focus was on the game and not so much on all the stories around it.”
This development is also surprising because the Bundesliga location Mönchengladbach has the reputation of being a kind of idyll. The conflicts driven by striving for power, the need for recognition and vanity, which are widespread in professional football, were not as significant on the Lower Rhine as elsewhere. At best, Eberl would tangle with part of his own audience if the expectations and reactions to the team’s game seemed inappropriate to him. Otherwise there was a constructive everyday harmony. In any case, a long phase of escalation began a year ago, the culmination of which is this farewell.
Borussia had just reached the last 16 of the Champions League for the first time in their history. Players like Marcus Thuram, Florian Neuhaus, Alassane Pléa, Matthias Ginter, Ramy Bensebaini and Denis Zakaria had aroused the interest of big clubs. But when coach Marco Rose announced in January 2021 that he wanted to work in Dortmund for the new season, a process of decomposition began.
Rose were insulted by fans and massively rejected, the team played more and more unsuccessfully, but Eberl decided against a separation despite atmospheric disturbances, after which the team failed to qualify for the European Cup. “Every defeat was also my defeat,” he reported, and because money suddenly ran out due to the pandemic, the urgently needed squad restructuring failed in the summer. The previously very popular players could no longer find buyers.
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Coach Adi Hütter, who was hired by Eintracht Frankfurt for 7.5 million euros, did not find any solutions for the highly complicated situation either, impressive victories such as the 5-0 win against Bayern Munich in the DFB Cup were followed by crushing defeats such as the 0-6 against SC Freiburg. In the meantime, it’s all about staying in the class and finding a suitable successor for Eberl.
