Marius Wolf
- 17
- Gregor Kobel 1
- Mateu Morey Bauza 2
- Nico Schlotterbeck 4
- Salih Özcan 6
- Giovanni Reyna 7
- Mahmoud Dahoud 8
- Sébastien Haller 9
- Marco Reus 11
- Raphael Guerreiro 13
- Nico Schulz 14
- Mats Hummels 15
- Youssoufa Moukoko 18
- Julian Brandt 19
- Anthony Modeste 20
- Donyell Malen 21
- Jude Bellingham 22
- Emre Can 23
- Thomas Meunier 24
- Niklas Süle 25
- Julian Ryerson 26
- Karim Adeyemi 27
- Felix Passlack 30
- Abdoulaye Kamara 32
- Alexander Meyer 33
- Marcel Lotka 35
- Tom Rothe 36
- Luca Unbehaun 38
- Göktan Gürpüz 42
- Jamie Bynoe-Gittens 43
- Soumaila Coulibaly 44
- Antonios Papadopoulos 47
The 27-year-old midfielder has been under contract with Borussia Dortmund since July 2018, but was sent out on loan to Hertha Berlin in the 2019/20 season and 1. FC Cologne for the 2020/21 season. As of June 2022 (reference date for all stats), Wolf has played 58 games for BVB (4 goals, 2 assists).
"The Wolf has been around the block. He has a long and interesting path behind him," says Marius Wolf about himself. He lives up to the club motto, which states: "And you keep getting up..." At the third attempt, he established himself in the BVB squad in 2021/22, and felt like the "twelfth man" – certainly one of the first options off the bench for the former head coach Marco Rose if he didn't let the Wolf play from the start. It was also common for him to start a game as a left winger and finish it playing at right-back. Flexibility is one of his biggest strengths, but Wolf's willingness to work and identification with the club are even more important – he still has the first kit he bought as a young fan. "It's somewhere in my parents' house," says Marius. Classic yellow with a black collar and also long black stripes on the sleeves. It was in that kit that Borussia Dortmund became German champions in 1996. It also gave Marius Wolf an eternal and true love for BVB, even if he was still a little under the radar at that time.
Marius Wolf started playing football as a three-year-old at VfB Einberg in his home town of Rödental. From 2004 to 2006, he played for the support association to promote football among young people in the Rödental and Coburg area. From summer 2006, Wolf trained at the German-Czech football school, a project in which German and Czech children and young people play football together and learn each other's languages and cultures. In January 2008, he joined the youth academy of 1. FC Nuremberg, where he stayed from the U13s to the U17s and attended the youth boarding school of the "Club" from 2010.
In 2012, he moved to the U19s at TSV 1860 Munich. Early on, Marius Wolf was allowed to get a taste of the first team, without ever really getting going. This was also the case with Hannover 96 and after his Bundesliga debut for the team from Lower Saxony on 27 February 2016. In September that year, 96 coach Daniel Stendel put him in the second team and thus in the regional league North. That shaped him and taught him how to deal with setbacks.
Wolf did not let his head drop and did not first blame others for his demotion. "The reason things didn't go so well in Hanover," he told the BORUSSIA members' magazine in September 2018, "was primarily down to me." Wolf, who by nature is actually a hard worker, had perhaps not done enough to make himself indispensable in Hanover. So, built up by his parents and his best mate, a friend from his youth, he began to work hard, undaunted in the basement of professional football and said to himself, "I will still get my chance, no matter where. That was the main reason I kept going."
Wolf then started out from the fourth tier. He first went to Frankfurt on and went to Berlin with Eintracht for the cup final in 2017 and 2018. He made up for the 2-1 defeat in the 2017 final to BVB with a 3-1 win against Bayern – the peak of his career so far. In 2017/18, he made 34 appearances for Eintracht, in which he scored six goals, set up another eleven and made himself indispensable with his directness and power – be it at full-back, in midfield midfielder or as a winger. "You can't stop him," said the former Eintracht sporting director Fredi Bobic about him. His former coach Niko Kovac attested: "Marius always gives everything – in training as well as in the game. He's also doesn't mind playing in positions that may not necessarily be his favourite position.
In the summer of 2018, the versatile Wolf moved to Borussia Dortmund, but after 22 appearances across all competitions, he was loaned to Hertha Berlin in September 2019. He spent the 2020/21 season at 1. FC Cologne, where he made 35 appearances (two goals, three assists), helping his side stay in the division in the relegation play-offs against Holstein Kiel before he returned to Dortmund in the summer of 2021. He was in the starting line-up 15 times during the last Bundesliga season. Marius Wolf scored three goals in the 12 games before the end of the season – a tally he has only surpassed in 2017/18, when he struck five times for Frankfurt.