“I’ve made a mistake”
RB boss sad about Max Eberl’s short term in office
January 3, 2024, 10:37 a.m
When Max Eberl signed on at RB Leipzig, he was praised as the Bundesliga club’s new big mover and shaker. But disillusionment quickly follows. Red Bull boss Oliver Mintzlaff is now talking about his term in office, which only lasted a few months. He also sees positive things.
Red Bull boss Oliver Mintzlaff looks back on the short tenure of former sports director Max Eberl at Bundesliga soccer club RB Leipzig with mixed feelings. “Looking back, I made a mistake,” the supervisory board chairman of the DFB Cup winners admitted to “Sport Bild”.
He was disappointed and sad, but not everything was bad. “The positive thing is that we signed really great players in the summer of 2023 who, although expensive, fit us extremely well.” Eberl, who was released again after just ten months, “immediately understood what our transfer philosophy looks like and how consistently we pursue it at RB Leipzig,” emphasized Mintzlaff: “I am very grateful to him for that.”
Mintzlaff, as the then managing director and CEO of Leipzig, brought Eberl in in December 2022, but the engagement was over again at the end of last September. “That’s how the club communicated it when we separated. Of course, there also needs to be a commitment. And there wasn’t enough of that, and so the separation was logical.” But he didn’t break up with Eberl “in a bad way.” Mintzlaff explained that there had been “a reasonable conversation”: “I also told him that I was disappointed and sad.”
Eberl has long been associated with FC Bayern Munich, where the 50-year-old is set to become the new sports director, according to the media. Nobody from Munich has contacted him yet, but he is also not the right person to contact, said Mintzlaff: “For that, FC Bayern would have to contact the management of RB Leipzig. We have a good relationship with FC Bayern, but it’s not so that Jan-Christian Dreesen (Bavaria’s CEO; editor) updates me daily.”
When looking for a successor for Eberl, RB “learned from the mistakes of the past” and did not allow itself to be pushed. As a club, we see a sporting director again “for the medium-term future”.