Before the top game at BVB, manager Max Eberl defended the player change from the Austrian first division club RB Salzburg to sister club RB Leipzig.
“In the long run, I’m just trying to get the best players to Leipzig – and if the best player plays for a possible replacement for Konni Laimer in Salzburg, then I’ll keep looking around,” said the 49-year-old at ” DAZN”.
A few days ago, midfielder Nicolas Seiwald was announced – the 21-year-old will be the 20th player to move from Salzburg to Leipzig since 2010.
“He’s very young, he’s very hungry, great potential – so a perfect RB transfer,” Eberl explained about the Seiwald commitment.
During his tenure as manager of Borussia Mönchengladbach, the current RB manager had criticized transfers between the Red Bull clubs Leipzig and Salzburg. “What bothers me about RB is this pushing of players from Salzburg to Leipzig and from Leipzig to Salzburg. That has a bad aftertaste for me because they basically have two squads,” Eberl said in an interview with “Focus Online” in 2016. said.
“The world has turned in football”
“I said something about it as an opponent at the time. Seven years later, the world has turned in football,” Eberl now explained his change of mind. Salzburg is a club “where we look, so we have no advantage,” said Eberl. “As with any other club, we will try to bring the best players to Leipzig.”
Eberl also commented on the former Mainz and Schalke official Rouven Schröder, who is about to become a sports director in Leipzig.
The 47-year-old is “of course a great professional,” praised Eberl. “If everything then works out as it seems, then we have a great sporting reinforcement to further strengthen the sporting team around the squad.”
RB is very ambitious, so you want to “position yourself very, very strongly”. Eberl named Dortmund and Bayern Munich as sporting competitors.
Schröder most recently worked as sports director for FC Schalke 04, where he resigned at the end of October last year for personal reasons.