“Whoever says that…”
Bayern boss Eberl counters criticism after burnout
September 24, 2024, 8:49 a.m
In an interview, Bayern sports director Max Eberl describes his burnout more clearly than ever before. Looking back, he says two and a half years later, he was given a new life. He also comments on his quick return to football.
More than two and a half years after his burnout illness, Bayern Munich’s sports director Max Eberl feels that he has come into his own despite returning to the football business. “Football is still very important to me, but no longer more important than my health and my private and mental peace. In a way, I have been given a new life,” Eberl told the specialist magazine “11Freunde”. “Today I live much more in the moment, I’m completely with myself, I’m just me. I never felt that way 40 years ago.”
The now 51-year-old resigned as sports director at Munich’s league rivals Borussia Mönchengladbach at the beginning of 2022 after a total of 23 years in various functions for the Rhinelander due to mental exhaustion. After Eberl revealed his strong need for a strict distance from football, his comeback just a few months later with similar tasks at the controversial first division club RB Leipzig was also accompanied by critical voices.
The Saxons parted ways with the ex-professional in autumn 2023 before Eberl took over the vacant position of sports director at record champions Munich last autumn. Eberl continues to emphatically reject the recurring accusation of intentionally deceiving the public when he left Gladbach. “Anyone who says that has no idea or is lying!”
As the native Bavarian described his condition at the time more clearly than ever before, he would have been “in a mill of demands for 40 years”: “I was no longer able to continue my life in the usual form and to carry out this job in the way that how it is now possible for me again and makes me happy. I realized that at some point I had lost myself, that I was only fitting a role. I no longer had the strength to get to the bottom of things, and I was covering it up Problems with more and more work – even though my body was screaming.”
