Ex-footballer
“30,000 euros gross. What got me there?”
11/28/2025 – 2:52 a.mReading time: 3 minutes
Professional soccer players generally earn a little more than average. It was no different with Max Kruse. Now the ex-striker revealed his income in great detail.
Once Max Kruse left something in the taxi. After an evening at the casino and then a trip to the restaurant, where he was accompanied by two women (“I had to sit in the middle”). That was in 2015. There was 75,000 euros in cash in the backpack that the then Bundesliga professional forgot in the trunk. Kruse filed a complaint against the taxi driver, but the money remained missing.
He then received – no joke – a fine from his club. To this day it is not known whether Kruse received the fine because of his night-time outing or because he was relatively careless with his assets. The episode is now part of Kruse folklore. He often performed them himself later.
It has also been known since this week what Kruse’s salary was during his career as a footballer. The former top athlete chatted about this extensively in the “Flatterball” podcast. Even though he emphasized that he couldn’t always remember everything, he could – and then the 37-year-old gave concrete numbers.
In 2006, he earned 1,250 euros a month with the Werder Bremen amateur team. When he signed his first professional contract in 2007, it was already 6,000 euros. After three years on the Weser, the Schleswig-Holsteiner moved to the district club FC St. Pauli in 2009, which was then playing in the 2nd league. There, Kruse initially received 12,000 euros and later 18,000 euros a month. At SC Freiburg, for whom he played in the Bundesliga from 2012, Kruse’s salary then rose to 30,000 euros.
A year later, Borussia Mönchengladbach signed the striker. Now the amounts on the bank statements reached six figures. The team from Lower Rhine transferred 100,000 euros to the dangerous attacker. Kruse paid back his annual salary worth millions with 25 goals and 22 assists in 77 games for the “Foals”.
Once we got to the top floor of performance compensation, things continued. “After that came Wolfsburg, that was 250,000. Then Werder Bremen, also 250,000,” said Kruse in the podcast, which he runs together with his former Werder teammate Martin Harnik. Kruse then moved to the Turkish Süper Lig, where he received 300,000 euros a month at Fenerbahce Istanbul.
But that was the peak, at least financially. In terms of sport, the ex-national player continued to reliably deliver scorer points in the double-digit range, but back in the Bundesliga he received “only” 125,000 euros from Union Berlin – for which he received the unrestricted love of the fans at the Alte Försterei. Because he obviously couldn’t buy real love, he moved again to Wolfsburg after just one season – because of the money, as he freely admitted back then.