After a hat-trick against Mainz
With the fourth hat-trick of his Bundesliga career, Max Kruse put VfL Wolfsburg on the winning track against FSV Mainz 05 (5-0) in the first half on Friday evening. For the 34-year-old, it was goals nine to eleven this season, six of them in the “Wolves” jersey. If you add the goals from his first spell in Lower Saxony in the 2015/16 season, VfL is already the fifth club in Kruse’s career for which he has scored ten times or more in the Bundesliga – only Bruno Labbadia has managed that with more clubs.
Kruse overtakes Fischer, Kuntz & Co.: 10+ Bundesliga goals for most clubs
The currently unemployed coach had between 1987 and 2000 for both Hamburger SV (11 goals) and 1.FC Kaiserslautern (20), FC Bayern Munich (28), 1.FC Cologne (15), Werder Bremen (18) and Arminia Bielefeld (11) scored a double-digit number of goals and thus has one more club than Kruse. This managed the yield alongside VfL for SC Freiburg (11), Borussia Mönchengladbach (23), Werder Bremen (32) and Union Berlin (16). Even before the weekend, the left foot belonged to a small and exclusive club: There are only six other players in four clubs with at least ten Bundesliga goals, including legendary strikers like Klaus Fischer, Manfred Burgsmüller and Stefan Kuntz.
In order to find a place in these statistics, a certain openness to transfers must of course be present in addition to a nose for goals. “It was always either about taking a career step – or it was about playing,” Labbadia justified his many and not always uncontroversial changes of club in 2018 in an interview with the “sports buzzer”. Kruse also caused astonishment with his return to Wolfsburg last winter – especially since Union was about European competition and VfL was against relegation.
No less admirable, however, is the fact that Kruse is employed by each of his employers and delivers his performance everywhere. In Florian Kohfeldt’s team, who “didn’t want to hang his attacker’s hat-trick too high” on Friday evening, he is already the top scorer behind Lukas Nmecha (8 league goals) – and that with far fewer games.
In order to break Labbadia’s record, Kruse, whose contract runs until 2023, would have to embark on a new path. The best chances would be at FC St. Pauli – assuming the Hamburgers manage to get promoted. In the 2010/11 season, Kruse was successful twice in the upper house for the “Kiezkicker”, so he only needed eight more goals.
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