The 28-year-old midfielder has been under contract with Borussia Dortmund since July 2018, but was sent out on loan to other clubs in the 2019/20 (Hertha Berlin) and 2020/21 (1. FC Cologne) seasons. As of June 2023 (the reference date for all statistics), he has made 90 appearances for BVB in all competitions (5 goals / 4 assists).

He embodies the club motto, which is: "And you always get back up again..." In 2021/22, he established himself in the BVB squad at the third attempt and felt like the "12th man" – certainly one of the first options off the bench for the former head coach Marco Rose. 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 commitment and identification 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.

In 2022/23, the wide man made 17 appearances in the starting XI and came on as a sub eight times. The versatile Wolf made himself the No. 1 on the right side of defence and earned a call-up for the national team, making his debut in March 2023. Last season in the Bundesliga, he won 56% of his challenges, ran 11.5km per 90 minutes on average, delivered the second-most crosses in the team (49, one leading to a goal) and scored the opening goal in the 2-1 victory in Freiburg.

Marius Wolf started playing football as a three-year-old at VfB Einberg in his home town of Rödental in Upper Franconia (Coburg district). 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. A move to the TSV 1860 Munich U19s followed in 2012. Marius Wolf was swiftly handed a taste of first-team life, without ever really getting going. This was also the case with Hannover 96, even after making his Bundesliga debut for the Lower Saxony outfit on 27 February 2016. In September that year, H96 coach Daniel Stendel dropped him down to the second team who were playing in the Regionalliga. 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 members' magazine Borussia 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 – with encouragement from his parents and his best mate, a friend from his youth – he got to work undeterred in the lower levels 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 started out from the fourth tier. He then moved to Frankfurt on loan and went to Berlin with Eintracht for the cup final in 2017 and 2018. He made up for the 2-1 defeat to BVB in the 2017 final with a 3-1 win against Bayern a year later – the peak of his career so far. "You can't stop him," said former Eintracht sporting director Fredi Bobic. His former coach Niko Kovac attested: "Marius always gives everything."

The all-rounder moved to Borussia Dortmund in the summer of 2018, but after 22 appearances in 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) and returned to Dortmund in the summer of 2021. Last winter, he demonstrated once again that he will not be derailed by adversity. He had to undergo an operation on his heart in November 2022. A minor atrial fibrillation had been diagnosed.