VW club in crisis
The downward spiral began with one departure
11/01/2025 – 10:46 a.mReading time: 5 minutes
Once again not much is going well at VfL Wolfsburg. There is a huge gap between expectations and reality at the VW club – even under the new coach.
The words that Paul Simonis chose on Tuesday evening were significant. “We played another game with too little energy,” said the VfL Wolfsburg coach after his team’s 1-0 home defeat in the second round of the DFB Cup against second division club Holstein Kiel. The Dutchman, who only moved to Lower Saxony as the new coach in the summer, put his finger in the wound. Because the problem that Simonis addressed is not a new one in Wolfsburg.
VfL has been lagging behind its own expectations for the entire season. The team is dragging itself through the second half of 2025 with uninspired, staid performances. In terms of performance, the team is not even close to reaching its limits. After the game against Kiel, in which just over 10,000 fans gathered in the Volkswagen Arena, which has around 29,000 seats, goalkeeper Marius Müller even spoke of serious attitude problems in the team. This fits: Even in the away win against newly promoted Hamburger SV last weekend, Wolfsburg were actually the clearly inferior team and ultimately got the three points with more luck than sense.
This is how it happens that after eight games in the Bundesliga, VfL has just eight points and is ranked twelfth in the table: coupled with the early exit from the cup, a more than unsatisfactory result for a club that actually sees itself as destined for greater things, precisely because of its financial possibilities. According to the publicly sometimes more, sometimes less verbalized sense of entitlement in the Autostadt, European business should actually always jump out at the end of a season. But the team under Simonis does not live up to this target – just as it did under his predecessors.
The last time there was Champions League football in Wolfsburg was four years ago because head coach Oliver Glasner managed to lead VfL to fourth place in the table in the 2020/2021 season. But the coach left the club shortly afterwards in a dispute. There are said to have been tensions with the then sports director Jörg Schmadtke and with some players.
Josuha Guilavogui, captain of the team at the time, even spoke publicly about his bad relationship with the Austrian. He was “very happy that he’s gone because for me personally it was the worst relationship I’ve ever had with a coach in my career,” said the Frenchman about Glasner. Accordingly, there was a lot of trouble in Wolfsburg even in more successful times. But the truth is also: Glasner’s departure marked the beginning of VfL’s recent sporting decline.