So bad that coaching legend Otto Rehhagel didn’t know any further: “Of course I don’t know what to do with Rudi Völler,” said Rehhagel. “Wherever we get there, he is brutally fouled and mashed down. Usually we can no longer let him play. What should we do, with the boy? I don’t know any more advice.”
From Bremen, Völler went to AS Rome as a player. In the “eternal city” he also met his wife Sabrina. In the documentation film, the now 65-year-old also returns to the Olympic Stadium in Rome, where he out of the 1990 World Cup final, which his best friend Andreas Brehme had transformed.
The importance of the relationship with the now deceased Brehme is evident in the film several times. Once when Völler discovers him as a picture on a pillar in the Olympic Stadium in Rome, Rudi Völler also has to suppress a tear. He says in a somewhat shaky voice: “My friend. Then I get goose bumps that Andi can still be seen here after so many years. I don’t even know if he knew it before his death. But that would have made him very proud that he can now be seen here.”
Sabrina Völler describes the relationship between the two as follows: “Andi Brehme was part of his life. They played together very young in the national team, they got on blindly, they both appreciated each other.”
In the end, Bayer Leverkusen, where Völler was only a player, was a great love, then sports director, in between also a trainer – and where he stayed in office until 2022. But it could have turned out very differently than in 1994 a change from Marseille: Paris, Bordeaux, Lisbon, Frankfurt, Cologne – they all wanted to sign the world champion. He chose Leverkusen.
At first it was not clear to his wife where Leverkusen was supposed to be. Sabrina Völler: “Leverkusen? My brother was there. I looked at my brother and said: ‘Where is that?’ Then my brother says: ‘Aspirin, Germany, Sabrina.’ “