At ten, “Sportschau” denied him the “Goal of the Month”

Today’s Bayern star

Ten-year-old Karl’s dream goal goes viral – coach remembers

A goal from an indoor soccer tournament seven years ago is currently spreading online. The reason: The goalscorer at the time was a ten-year-old Lennart Karl.

Lennart Karl is currently the shooting star of German football. The FC Bayern winger was already noticed as a ten-year-old when he hit a ball into the net for a potential goal of the month. The video of the hit is now going viral again – and t-online spoke to his coach at the time, who also uploaded the scene to Instagram.

“Lennart used to throw out things like that a lot back then,” says Kerim Mokline, former coach of Eintracht Frankfurt’s U11s and co-discoverer of today’s Bayern star. “That’s why the goal didn’t come as a complete surprise, it wasn’t his first great goal.” The ten-year-old’s goal was the decisive 2-0 win in the final of an indoor tournament at the beginning of December 2018 against Borussia Mönchengladbach. “I remember that very well, in the group phase we lost 6-0.”

Karl played his second season at Eintracht, coached by Coach Mokline. Even back then, Karl, the youngest German goalscorer in the Champions League since his goal against Bruges (17 years, 242 days), was early: at the age of nine he was allowed to play for the Frankfurt U11. “At that age he was already technically outstanding and ahead of many,” says Mokline. The then 24-year-old and a scouting employee discovered Karl at Viktoria Aschaffenburg and were able to win him over to Eintracht when Mokline was supposed to rebuild the Bundesliga club’s U11 team.

And after just a few weeks, Karl scored the first possible “goal of the month” for Eintracht: the nine-year-old converted a corner straight away – in the derby against Offenbach. Lennart Karl accepted the goal very coolly, his teammates cheered him and the goal much more than he did. Eintracht uploaded the video.

Things were different with the goal that is now circling again. A parent in the stands filmed the feat and gave the video to Mokline, who uploaded it to his Instagram and Facebook accounts. He quickly received a request from “433,” a large Instagram account for football tidbits with tens of millions of followers. The video spread quickly and several major media outlets became interested. And the ten-year-old’s parents were already able to gain their first experience with the press. Mokline referred journalists to Eintracht, who arranged contact with the parents.