First Team

One EURO winner

Facts on the Wolves’ representatives at previous European Championships.

When the first European Championship was held in 1960, Wolfsburg were playing in the lower reaches of Lower Saxony’s amateur divisions. Four decades passed until the first VfL player got to play in the tournament. Now, 24 years later, there are more than ever before. What Wolf tracks can be traced in EURO history? Our facts and figures from a VfL point of view provide the answers ahead of the start of this year’s tournament on Friday evening.

  • In the 337 European Championship matches to date, 16 different VfL Wolfsburg players have featured. Pavao Pervan, who was Austria’s third-choice goalkeeper in 2021, came close but didn’t make an appearance. One special case is Simon Kjaer, who featured in the 2012 tournament as an AS Roma player on loan from the Green-and-Whites.
     
  • The biggest contingent of the Wolves’ EURO players have come from Switzerland to date, namely Diego Benaglio (2008), Ricardo Rodriguez (2016), Kevin Mbabu and Admir Mehmedi (both 2021). Cedric Zesiger could soon become the fifth Swiss.
     
  • The Wolves’ first EURO participant was a Romanian: Dorinel Munteanu, who went on to become his country’s most capped player, played in the 2000 edition in Belgium and the Netherlands as the first VfL player at a EURO, featuring in four games and also becoming the Green-and-Whites’ first EURO goalscorer. The midfielder found the net to make it 2-2 in a 3-2 triumph over England.
     
  • Wolfsburg are listed with a total of nine goals in the European Championship chronicles. Mario Mandzukic (three) and Petr Jiracek (two) lead the way, while Martin Petrov, Julian Draxler and Wout Weghorst have, like Munteanu, also scored once.
     
  • Across the Bundesliga, only RB Leipzig (11), champions Bayer Leverkusen and Bayern Munich (both 10) have sent more players to the current tournament than VfL, who are represented by eight players, surpassing the previous record of six in 2021.
  • Part of the Green-and-Whites’ 2015 DFB Cup-winning team, Vieirinha also lifted the EURO trophy a year later with Portugal, the only Wolfsburg player to have done so as yet.
     
  • In the list of all-time EURO appearance makers, the first name with a VfL connection is Mario Gomez in 29th position. However, only the last of his 13 EURO games came during his time with the Wolves: in Germany’s quarter-final win on penalties over Italy on 2 July 2016, he was on the pitch for 72 minutes before being replaced by future VfL teammate Julian Draxler.
     
  • Even before VfL were promoted to the Bundesliga, players who would later wear the green and white were already playing in European Championships: Pavel Novotny in 1996, a year before joining the Wolves, and Stefan Effenberg in 1992 – 10 years before his stint with VfL.
     
  • If later VfL coaches and officials are included in the analysis, the result is a considerable increase in European Championship experience: Klaus Allofs (1980 and 1984), Pierre Littbarski (1984 and 1988) and Niko Kovac (2004 and 2008) each played in two tournaments. Mark van Bommel was involved in 2012 and Thomas Strunz even won the title with Germany in 1996. As assistant to Sven-Göran Erikson, Steve McClaren was also part of the England coaching team in 2004.
     
  • The EURO fixture with the greatest, albeit at the time completely unknown, VfL connection was probably the 1980 final. The German team that won the title with a 2-1 victory over Belgium included Horst Hrubesch, Allofs and Felix Magath, who did not play in the final. Eric Gerets, another future VfL coach, played for the opposition.