“It shouldn’t have happened like that”
Bremen boss admits embarrassing rule error
January 14, 2026 – 6:40 a.mReading time: 1 min.
A DFL regulation recently led to confusion at Werder Bremen. The person in charge appears frustrated.
Werder Bremen’s sports director Clemens Fritz has admitted a mistake after confusion over the loan regulations in the Bundesliga. “We previously had an internal, communicative misunderstanding on this point that we stumbled upon,” he told the “Deichstube” portal.
At the beginning of November, Werder declared that they would not be able to make any further loans after the six loans had already been completed. The Hanseatic people corrected that later. Because: The German Football League (DFL) only limits the number of simultaneous loans from other domestic clubs to six. Transfers from abroad are not subject to this restriction.
“I take responsibility for it,” emphasized Fritz and admitted: “The incident really upsets us because it shouldn’t have happened like that.”
Bizarrely, the correction of the incorrect interpretation of the rules did not come from within our own ranks. “It is true that we were made aware by an external tip that further loans were possible,” confirmed the Werder boss. According to “Deichstube” the crucial information came from the “Transfermarkt” portal.
The Bundesliga club has already taken advantage of its now better knowledge of the rules and last Sunday loaned Serbian attacker Jovan Milošević from VfB Stuttgart until the end of the season. He is already the seventh loan player after Karl Hein (Arsenal), Yukinari Sugawara (Southampton), Cameron Puertas (Al-Qadsiah), Maximilian Wöber, Isaac Schmidt (both Leeds United) and Victor Boniface (Bayer 04 Leverkusen).