Max Eberl quit Gladbach exhausted; at Bayern he says his skin has grown thick

Max Eberl

Photo: Muffutz (Diskussion) / CC BY-SA 3.0 de, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 21, 1973 Bogen
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	Bundesliga · DFB-Pokal · Franz Beckenbauer Supercup

Eight seconds into Bayern Munich’s game at Augsburg, Manuel Neuer took a heavy first touch, tried to play his way out of trouble and gave Robin Fellhauer the fastest goal in Bundesliga history. Afterwards it was Max Eberl who had to explain it, and he did not shield his captain for long. Neuer, he said, had controlled the ball badly and then “solved it too riskily”. Most of the blame he put on a team that “had enough chances to win the game anyway” and settled for a draw, with four goals ruled out for offside. It was routine work for Bayern’s sporting chief. By his own account, it is also the kind of work he once could no longer do.

That is the knot at the centre of Eberl’s career. He left Borussia Mönchengladbach, the club he had served for more than two decades as player and executive, at a press conference he could barely get through. “I am exhausted and tired and cannot work any more,” he said. “I have to get out and look after the human being Max Eberl.” Two years later he took the most exposed seat in German football, at a club whose honorary president, Uli Hoeneß, discusses the board’s view of its executives on television. Eberl’s own diagnosis, offered this summer: “My skin has become thick.”

Maximilian Michael Eberl comes from Bogen, a small town on the Danube in Lower Bavaria, where he was born on 21 September 1973. Bayern took him into their youth system as a small boy. He was a defender, capped by Germany at every youth level up to the under-21s, and he went to the 1993 World Youth Championship in Australia. His Bundesliga career with Bayern lasted exactly one match, a 3-2 defeat at VfB Stuttgart in October 1991. He later recalled that kicker gave him a five for it, the second-worst mark the magazine hands out.

The rest of his playing career happened elsewhere, and without goals. He joined VfL Bochum in January 1994, moved to SpVgg Greuther Fürth, and in 1999 arrived at Gladbach, where he played 137 league games at right-back. In more than two hundred professional matches he never scored. When he stopped playing in 2005, Gladbach kept him, first as youth coordinator and then as head of the academy.

In October 2008 he became sporting director of a newly promoted side sitting bottom of the table. Hans Meyer kept them up. Eberl joined the management board two years later, and early in 2011, with the club close to relegation again, he brought in Lucien Favre. Favre steered them through a relegation play-off against Bochum, Eberl’s old club, and then built a team that played its way into the Champions League. Across Eberl’s thirteen years in charge Gladbach reached the group stage of that competition three times and the Europa League twice; they averaged 52 points a season, against 39 in the twelve seasons before he took over. He kept selling the players who made it possible, Marco Reus to Dortmund and Marc-André ter Stegen to Barcelona among them. In 2020 he also became the first club official in the Bundesliga to be shown a straight red card in the technical area, for protesting a decision at Freiburg.

It ended at the end of January 2022, in the middle of a season, in front of the cameras. Eberl cried, said the speculation about his motives was exactly what made him ill, and said he simply wanted out. When he came back, in December, it was at RB Leipzig, a club he had publicly criticised while running Gladbach. Leipzig retained the DFB-Pokal the following June. By the end of September 2023 he was gone, dismissed on the eve of a game against Bayern. The club said “the lack of commitment to the club” had forced its hand, and Oliver Mintzlaff, the Red Bull executive who had fought to hire him, said the relationship “could not be saved”. Eberl had never ruled out a move to Munich.

Bayern made him board member for sport from 1 March 2024, and his first big task went badly in public. The club needed a successor to Thomas Tuchel. Xabi Alonso stayed at Bayer Leverkusen, Julian Nagelsmann extended his contract with Germany, and Ralf Rangnick said no. Eberl ended up with Vincent Kompany, whose Burnley had just been relegated from the Premier League. It looked like a fourth choice. Kompany won the Bundesliga in his first season. In his second, Bayern won the league with a record 122 goals and the DFB-Pokal with a 3-0 final against Stuttgart in which Harry Kane scored three times, and they reached a Champions League semi-final they lost 6-5 on aggregate to Paris Saint-Germain.

The trophies have not settled the argument about Eberl, because at Bayern the argument is rarely about trophies. His transfer record is uneven. Michael Olise, signed from Crystal Palace in his first summer, became one of the most productive attackers in Europe. Florian Wirtz chose Liverpool instead. Bayern chased Nick Woltemade for a whole summer, offered €55 million and watched him leave for Newcastle. Hoeneß went on television in September 2025 to say that Eberl was “pretty sensitive” about internal disputes and that he would have liked to buy a player, “but we know our cash position”. Then, on the day of the cup final this May, with the double hours away, Hoeneß told Der Spiegel that the odds on Eberl’s extension stood at “60 to 40” and that “there are still doubts”. The man who had left Gladbach saying the speculation made him ill now had his own future handicapped in public, on the day of his biggest win.

His reply was the summer window. Bayern spent around €50 million each on Nathaniel Brown and Ismael Saibari, Hoeneß called it “a perfect transfer window” and revised his odds to 100 per cent, and on 25 August the supervisory board extended Eberl’s contract, along with that of chief executive Jan-Christian Dreesen, by two years to mid-2029. Eberl said he was proud precisely because he did not believe the extension was a gift. “You can only learn Bayern Munich when you are inside it,” he said.

The work, as he put it, goes on and on. Talks over a new contract for Harry Kane have begun, and a side that dominated Augsburg and still dropped points has to find the precision that deserted it against Paris. Whether he serves it out will depend less on what Bayern win than on what the men above him say about him in public, and on whether, this time, the thicker skin holds.

Tags: sports, athletes, Bundesliga, FC Bayern Munich, Max Eberl, Borussia Mönchengladbach

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