Effenberg Walks Out On Wolfsburg

[Carson35]

Effenberg Walks Out On Wolfsburg
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New controversy for Effenberg (Allsport)
04/03/2003. VfL Wolfsburg have released Stefan Effenberg from his contract after a request from the controversial midfielder.

The former German international fell out with coach Jurgen Rober and asked to leave the club, who he joined in the summer after being released by Bayern Munich.

Röber asked Effenburg to lose weight, which didn't go down well with the player, who has a reputation for falling out with just about everyone.

Röber has only been in charge of Wolfsburg for a month after he replaced the sacked Wolfgang Wolf.

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[Haimrevivo1]

He said today in an interview, that he got an offer by a club in Katar. He thinks that Katar is a nice country to play, but he will definetly not play in Germany anymore.

A real shame for this professionell

[Carson35]

Saturday, April 5, 2003

Effenberg considers Qatar move

BERLIN, April 5 (Reuters) - Former Germany midfielder Stefan Effenberg, who has just ended his Bundesliga career, says he is now considering a move to Qatar.

Effenberg: Middle East move? (StuartFranklin/GettyImages)

'There is interest from Qatar,' said the 34-year-old former Bayern Munich captain. 'I have spoken to their federation and the talks were very positive.'

Effenberg said he expected to make a decision in the next few months on whether to pursue his career in the Gulf state currently hosting the U.S. Central Command forward headquarters.

'I could be going in August or September,' he told Saturday's Bild daily.

The enfant terrible of German soccer quit VfL Wolfsburg on Thursday after repeated run-ins with the club's new coach, Juergen Roeber, and said he would never play in the Bundesliga again.

He had joined Wolfsburg at the start of the current season from Bayern, whom he captained to their Champions League triumph in 2001.

Controversy has accompanied Effenberg throughout a career featuring 370 Bundesliga games and 35 appearances for Germany.

The gifted but temperamental playmaker was sent home from the 1994 World Cup finals in the United States for giving a single finger gesture when he was substituted amid boos following a poor performance in a group game against South Korea. He made a brief comeback for Germany in 1998.

He also ran into trouble while playing for Bayern, being criticised and briefly dropped last year after saying many unemployed people in Germany were too lazy to look for work.

Two years ago he paid a ?0,000 out-of-court settlement after being charged with assault for hitting a woman in a Munich nightclub.

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=============

why not consider a move to tottenham?? we need a tough DM like effenberg...

[Wally]

Quote:

Originally posted by Carson35
why not consider a move to tottenham?? we need a tough DM like effenberg...

Spot on Carson! a midfield general like Stefan Effenberg is what Spurs need. A guy who can supply passes to runners like Davies and Etherington!
Fenerbahce also ought to get him! Effe has been outstanding for Wolfsburg when I saw him. That log over the goalie he scored earlier is just testomony how great Stefan Effenberg is

[Rosicky]

he's not the right man....he weight is 90 kilos and the team said he should reduce it to at least 88 kilos....because he wasn' able to tun 50 without falling out of breathe....so he didn't want to make a diet so he quits job...Quatar is a good place for him

[Carson35]

Effenberg Weighs Qatar Option
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Effe during his glory days with Bayern (Allsport)
05/12/2003.
Stefan Effenberg has revealed that he is considering coming out of retirement for a final - not to mention lucrative - curtain-call for an unnamed Qatari team.

"I will be flying to Qatar at the end of the week, to see what things are like and will decide soon afterwards," said the 34-year-old former German international midfielder, who retired from the game last April following a falling-out with VfL Wolfsburg coach Jurgen Rober.

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[Carson35]

Wednesday, May 14, 2003

Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger

Unreliable memoirs

Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger

I know that the things you really love about football are the games, the results, the standings.

Effenberg: Booze swilling, pot smoking lady-killer. Or that's what he'd have you believe. (StuartFranklin/GettyImages)

Probably also pouring over statistics and debating tactics. I know that you don't read the tabloids, abhor smutty gossip and feel bored by scabrous details from players' private lives.

Still, I have to burden you with some of that, because I'm here to report on what's going on in Germany at the moment _and that's mainly Stefan Effenberg's autobiography, 'I Showed Them All'.

Parts of that book were serialized in Germany's biggest tabloid, Bild, during the week leading up to its publication. Bild obviously felt they had such sensational stuff on their hands that they plastered half of the country with eye-catching billboards bearing slogans such as 'The friendly game is over' or 'I am my own idol'.

Each new installment was announced on the front page, in letters so bold they almost left no space for the pictures, some of which depicted Effenberg and his girlfriend Claudia (still the wife of Effenberg's former team-mate Thomas Strunz) half-naked. Or not really half-naked, because there wasn't that much skin visible due to acres of tattoes.

A week ago, Effenberg was the sole guest on a sixty-minute chat show, a few hours after a news channel had broadcasted his presentation of the book at a department store live. (In the course of which a man yelled at him: 'Fornication! Adultery! Read the bible!').

Last Monday, Effenberg and Claudia sat with a well-known talkshow host for thirty minutes to explain they exchanged the first, shy kisses after eating sushi in a hotel room but didn't have sex that day.

Is the book really so stunning it warrants such hullabaloo? First, I have to admit I just read the serialization in Bild, and that only because a UK newspaper asked me to translate it. Second, while you're probably expecting me to say 'No, it's overhyped and pretty boring, actually', I have to concede there are things about it that did stun me.

We've had some headline-generating books by footballers before. In 1993, Uli Stein's autobiography claimed his Frankfurt team had lost the league title because of Andreas Möller's disruptive influence and that Stein hadn't gotten games at the 1986 World Cup only because he didn't have a contract with adidas. Toni Schumacher's book (1987) even got the goalkeeper banned by club and country for a chapter called 'Syringes and Sex' that dealt with doping and groupies.

But Effenberg's expos?is different in that he's not content with a few choice words and encapsulated references. Rather, he's often so detailed that it makes you wonder in which lofty heights his embarrassment threshold resides. You want to know in which position he vomited after the first night about town with his erstwhile wife Martina? You'd like to hear how Strunz found out about him and Claudia and what he said? You're interested in what exactly the two men downed that day? It's all here.

¡§ I later spread out the empty bottles all over the hotel corridor so as not to give the impression an alcoholic had housed in my room. ¡¨
¡X Hard drinkin' Steffen Effenberg

(Just for the record: A. On his knees and with his head in the toilet bowl. B. Effenberg sent Claudia an SMS text - reprinted verbatim, of course - whereupon Strunz called and yelled 'You pig stole my wife!' C. Strunz emptied a few cans of vodka lemon, while Effenberg gulped down a fig schnapps, brand name: 'Little Coward'.)

And on it goes. He's smoking weed with two Fiorentina players and boozing with Giovane Elber, Roque Santa Cruz and Carsten Jancker at Bayern. ('I later spread out the empty bottles all over the hotel corridor so as not to give the impression an alcoholic had housed in my room.')

He calls Lothar Matthäus a 'cheeky big-mouth' and a 'quitter', because Matthäus didn't take the penalty in the 1990 World Cup final and got himself substituted against Manchester United in the 1999 Champions League final.

While he's again quite explicit about these incidents, it's all strangely feeble. He isn't really a drinker (none of our players are, certainly not by English standards), which makes his confessions sound like pubescent bragging.

And his evidence against Matthäus is shaky. We know why Matthäus didn't take the penalty in 1990 (he had to change a boot at halftime and felt uncomfortable in the new one), and his substitution in 1999 was one of those things where hindsight is nice but fruitless.

Half of the writers watching from the press stand that night thought it was inviting disaster to take off the best player in the dying minutes of a close game; the other half thought it was inviting disaster to leave a knackered man on when fresh legs were available.

Matthäus and his coach Ottmar Hitzfeld simply made a decision that may have been detrimental, but I can't see why that constitutes quitting.

The second thing that stunned me about the book has nothing to do with what Effenberg tells. It's how he tells it. Boris Becker has commented that he was annoyed by the usage of 'gutter language', and that's putting it mildly.

The son of Effenberg's coach at Fiorentina is 'breaking in' the president's daughter-in-law; his Gladbach team-mate Jörg Neun is 'shagging' a single mother; a drunk has 'shat and pissed all over himself'; and when Effenberg goes to vomit yet again he's of course 'puking'. (I only use the examples I know how to translate!)


Asked about this language, Effenberg said: 'I could have used the term 'sexual intercourse', but nobody would buy it that I talk like that.'

Problem is, you don't buy the gutter language, either. When he appeared on tv, Effenberg had a constant smile on his face, as if he knew he was acting out a farce, and he spoke in a relaxed, considered manner. Later, when the host inquired about the ad slogan 'Love knows no fairplay', he replied: 'It wasn't my choice. You know how this business works.'

And the way this business works is very probably that the two tabloid hacks who helped, if that's the word, with the book and the serialization did their best to spice up Effenberg's accounts, probably using a slang thesaurus.

Either that, or Effenberg suffers from multiple personality disorder. Which would explain some of the games he played, especially for Germany, headlined: 'I showed them nothing'.

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[Carson35]

Effenberg To End Career In Qatar
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Effenberg during his time with Bayern (Allsport)
05/17/2003.
German footballing legend Stefan Effenberg has signed a lucrative contract with Qatari club Al-Arabhi where he will spend his final year as a professional footballer.

The infamously temperamental 37-year-old had originally intended to retire from the game when he walked out on VfL Wolfsburg last April but the lure of a reported $2m evidently proved too tempting to resist.

The former Bayern skipper insisted that next season shall be his last, however. "There is no way I'll be convinced to tack on another year," said Effe. "After next season it will be high time to join up with my kids in Florida."

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