In the 2020/21 season, Holger Badstuber, then 31, played against Eintracht Stadtallendorf and Bayern Alzenau in the Regionalliga Südwest. He was transferred to the second team at VfB Stuttgart, after injury problems there were disagreements about his role. The club wanted to get rid of him but the former international pulled through with 28 appearances in the fourth division. “That’s just my path and my special career,” he said at the time. “And maybe that’s Holger Badstuber, who you remember in the end.”
The Holger Badstuber, who is remembered now that he has officially ended his career, is of course not the Holger Badstuber who played against Bayern Alzenau. He is the Holger Badstuber for Bayern Munich Not has played.
He didn’t play in the 2013 Champions League final in London when Bayern won 2-1 against Borussia Dortmund; his colleagues held his jersey up to the cameras during the celebrations. He didn’t play when the national team won the World Cup in Brazil in 2014. And he didn’t play when FC Bayern lost to Atletico Madrid in the Champions League semifinals in 2016 and the national team to France in the semifinals of the European Championship. Badstuber made 166 Bundesliga appearances, missing 200 possible Bundesliga games due to a terrible series of injuries. The former national coach Joachim Löw once said: “It’s unbelievable that Holger hits it again and again.”
After a crack on December 1, 2012, the career becomes a medical record
The story becomes all the sadder when you imagine what would have been possible if Badstuber had played. In the 2009/10 season, when he was just 20 years old and had only had a professional contract with FC Bayern for a few months, the new coach Louis van Gaal entrusted him with the regular position in central defence. And the talent interpreted the position in a way that was sensational at the time – not just with resilience, header power and precise tackling, but also with elegant passing and technical ability. Just one year later, Badstuber and a certain Thomas Müller were part of the World Cup squad, and all the experts and non-experts predicted a great future for this duo.
Champions League winners 2013: Bastian Schweinsteiger, David Alaba, Diego Contento, Mario Mandzukic, Jerome Boateng and Xherdan Shaqiri (from left) with the jersey of the injured Holger Badstuber.
(Photo: Ulmer/Imago)
And then: December 1, 2012, Bundesliga game between FC Bayern and Borussia Dortmund, 35 minutes, a crack. Badstuber, now 23, twisted his knee in a duel with Mario Götze. cruciate ligament tear. From now on, your career will become a medical record.
Badstuber needs six months to get reasonably fit again, then the ligament tears again. Until August 2014 he cannot play a single game. In the fall of 2014 and spring of 2015, muscles and tendons in the thigh tear. In 2015, Löw nominated him for the national team again, and when he returned to the field in November, the fans shouted his name for minutes. In February 2016, Badstuber suffered a dislocated ankle fracture. During training, his cleats get caught on a sliding tackle in the grass. No outside influence, no culprit. seasonal off.
Two cruciate ligament ruptures, a tendon rupture, a thigh muscle rupture, a broken ankle – injuries are part of football, but what Holger Badstuber goes through creates compassion even in the often unsympathetic industry. Competitor Borussia Dortmund also sends recovery wishes: “A Badstuber always gets up.”
Conclusion in Switzerland: At the end, Holger Badstuber played for FC Luzern for a year.
(Photo: Manuel Geisser/Imago)
This time Badstuber didn’t get up again, at least not at Bayern Munich. After a brief stint in the first half of the season, he moved to Schalke in the winter of the 2016/17 season and to Stuttgart in the summer of 2017. If he could play, he played, but Transfermarkt.de also lists for his time at VfB: adductor injury, thigh strain, adductor problems, calf injury, calf problems, muscle fiber tear. And finally: Regionalliga Südwest. Then another year in Switzerland at FC Luzern, since December 16, 2021: without a club, since September 5, 2022: end of career.
Badstuber now wants to be a coach, like his father, who got him into football and always wanted to see him at Bayern Munich. Hermann Badstuber did not live to see the promising start to his career, he died in 2009. Badstuber will be able to convey to his players that it is a privilege to be on the field as a footballer, and he will give them diligence and irrepressible willpower. Seen in this way, the Holger Badstuber who stays is actually the Holger Badstuber who played against Stadtallendorf and Alzenau.
“I want to follow in my father’s footsteps,” he said. He wants to give something back to him – and can hope that football will give something back to him.
