Simon Rolfes: From midfield dynamo to decision maker
The ranks of the honorary captains were extended by the addition of Rüdiger Vollborn and Stefan Kießling in the summer of 2019. bayer04.de is using the current period without games to say a big thank you to these Werkself legends every Friday over the next few weeks. The fourth instalment of the six-part series is dedicated to Simon Rolfes, named honorary captain in 2015 and now the sporting director at Bayer 04 since December 2018.
Early on, Simon Rolfes assumed the characteristics of determination and stamina that were features of him as a player and now benefit him in his second career in management. One of his three brothers challenged him when he was 16 years old: If he could keep the ball up over 3,000 times then he would get an original Tricolore, the ball used at the 1998 World Cup finals. Rolfes won the bet three-quarters of an hour and over 4,000 touches of the ball later. This nice anecdote from his teenage years says a lot about the ambitious lad from Ibbenbüren, who moved on from his home club of TuS Recke in the Westphalian administrative district of Steinfurt the following year in the summer of 1999 to join the Werder Bremen U19s.
However, the ambitious and incredibly driven fair-haired youngster had to accept a circuitous route to achieving his dream of becoming a professional footballer. His sporting CV does include winning the Bundesliga and the DFB Cup in 2004 with Werder but the 22-year-old did not play for a single minute for the Green and White first team in that season. “I was too stubborn and impatient at the time,” Simon Rolfes once explained. He made 104 appearances for the Bremen Reserves in the Regional League North but the lean and stringy left-footer had to wait for his eagerly awaited debut in Germany’s top flight. After six months on loan at second division SSV Reutlingen in 2003, Simon Rolfes joined Alemannia Aachen in the summer of 2004 on a free transfer.
A calculated move – and the change that brought the breakthrough. Rolfes made 37 appearances and had a great season for Alemannia in the second division and the UEFA Cup, and that attracted the attention of Bayer 04 to the dynamic strategist in midfield. Thanks to a release clause, Simon Rolfes was available for €750,000, a real bargain in the transfer market. The fact Leverkusen were interested in him played right into Rolfes' hands as he once revealed in an interview about the transfer process: "I want to stay in the Rhineland and Bayer 04 were, and are still, a fantastic club. So I speculated Leverkusen wanted to do some business in that position. And then they called me up, there was a good discussion with Rudi Völler on Tuesday, one with the coach Klaus Augenthaler on Thursday and I signed on Saturday."
The new boy went straight into the first team. Definitely a surprise for many but less so for him: "I thought I was in with a good chance. Bernd Schneider could also have played in central midfield but he was usually on the right side. Otherwise, in central midfield, there was only Carsten Ramelow and Gonzalo Castro, who only played a couple of games back then as an 18-year-old. So I was the third man. The fact there were only three people in the running for this position at such a top club obviously increased my chances." Rolfes made his Bundesliga debut in the opening fixture of the 2005 campaign at Eintracht Frankfurt, still a very special moment for him: "It was a childhood dream. And even though it was just for 15 minutes and we were already 4-1 up. Actually, it was completely unspectacular but simply brilliant for me."
Bayer 04 supporters quickly appreciated the number six who was comfortable on the ball and full of energy. Particularly when Simon Rolfes frenetically celebrated his first Bundesliga goal with the fans in the North Stand a few weeks later. He received the ball from Athirson with his back to the goal, controlled it with the sole of his foot and smashed it into the back of the net. And it wasn't just any old game but rather the winner in the 2-1 derby victory against FC Köln. Rolfes was now established at the Werkself. "You somehow belong when you score your first goal. It was a very moving moment for me. I had the feeling, okay, here we go."
And it really took off! Starting with this derby, on matchday six in the 2005/06 season, Rolfes played 131 Bundesliga games in succession for the Black and Reds with nearly all going the full distance. Quite simply, a dynamo. The high point of the 2007/08 season: Rolfes played all 34 league games and was on the pitch all the time with the exception of three minutes and he scored eight goals. "I played in all the games for nearly four seasons. Today that's almost impossible to imagine because football is too quick for that now," he said.
It was no surprise the big fair-haired man with exceptional tactical skill soon received his call-up for the national team. After the baptism of fire in the Bundesliga, it was another very memorable moment for him: "2007 against Denmark, I remember it like it was yesterday. I was in the players tunnel and thought, wow now you're playing for the national team. It was a dream come true. Playing for Germany is at another level compared with club football. The whole country is watching you. It was the start of a great time with the national side." Simon Rolfes made it to the Euro 2008 final with Germany after he had a great game in the 3-2 quarter-final victory against Portugal, which was definitely his best performance in 26 international appearances.
The World Cup two years later in South Africa was right up his street. That was until his knee went on strike. A meniscus operation in the summer of 2009, then the next setbacks a couple of months later: first, a torn medial collateral ligament, then cartilage damage in his knee, further operations and nearly a year on the sidelines. The midfield dynamo was suddenly a permanent patient. “It was definitely the toughest time in my career. I was always healthy and suddenly the time between operations grew ever shorter. My knee got worse and worse. Of course, I was worried about that and I asked myself how it was going to carry on? Would I be able to carry on? Having the patience to regain confidence in my knee was an intensive process. You spend all your time in the gym and you hardly make any progress.”
After almost a year of worries and self-doubt, setbacks and helplessness. But Rolfes fought back – carefully led by Jupp Heynckes – step-by-step and he celebrated a spectacular comeback as a leader. 16 October 2010, an away game at VfL Wolfsburg, Rolfes came on after 69 minutes. The protagonist remembers it as follows: "It was mad, like in a film. I felt really good on the day. The score was 1-0 for Wolfsburg, time was running out, and I asked myself why I wasn't being brought on at long last. It was 2-0 when they called me over and I put my shirt on. I threw my water bottle down and swore. That's how I went onto the pitch. When I pulled a goal back from a free kick, we noticed as a team that something was happening. I won a penalty that Arturo Vidal converted and then I was in just the right spot from a corner where I was able to put the ball away to make it 3-2. All that happened in 12 minutes."
What else can he remember after ten years as a Bayer 04 player with 377 appearances and 49 goals? His best goal? "The 3-0 against Alemannia Aachen on the first matchday in 2006/07, a right-foot volley into the top corner." The best successes? "Taking part in so many Champions League campaigns, the cup final in 2009, finishing runners-up in 2011." The best teammates? "Dimitar Berbatov, he had incredible technical ability. You could play the ball to him wherever you wanted and it's like you had a magnet in his foot. Bernd Schneider also had brilliant technique and could do everything with the ball." What he misses most? "The Champions League nights, that special atmosphere when you go to the stadium, see the floodlights and then you run on the turf that’s a bit wet. Those were always special moment for me."
On 16 May 2015, the BayArena said a final farewell to their captain Simon Rolfes in a 2-0 victory over Hoffenheim. He ended his playing career a week later in Frankfurt – at the venue for his Bundesliga debut ten years before. There could not be more fitting way to bring it all full circle.
It didn't take long for his second career to begin. A bright and alert guy like him acts exactly as he did on the pitch: as a far-sighted strategist with a large number of appearances. Together with Dr Markus Elsässer, he founded an agency for young professional athletes and took over, with his partner, the GoalControl GmbH company that was involved in goal-line technology. As a ZDF football pundit, he regularly analysed the Bundesliga matchdays on the 'Sportreportage' programme. And after that, the father of three daughters, who occasionally plays for the Bayer 04 Veterans, successfully completed his Master for International Players (MIP), a two-year course offered by UEFA. In addition to Rolfes, former international top stars such as the Frenchman Christian Karembeau and Eric Abidal, the Portuguese Nuno Gomes and the Brazilian Juninho were also provided with the necessary qualifications for a future career in administration or football management.
The participants had to pay for the course themselves including travel expenses. "It was a tidy sum," said Rolfes. "But it was worth it to me. It was always my intention to learn as much as possible to build up a solid base of knowledge and skills and to combine it with my experience as a player." For his diploma project, the 38-year-old chose an ambitious subject: "Football academies in Europe." Rolfes put in a lot of research, travelled all over Europe off his own bat and visited nine clubs – in Spain Barcelona, Atlético Madrid and Athletic Bilbao, in England Tottenham Hotspur, in the Netherlands PSV Eindhoven, in Austria RB Salzburg and in Germany Borussia Dortmund, Borussia Mönchengladbach and RB Leipzig. He stopped off at each club for a couple of days, spoke to the youth team directors, managers and presidents and analyse the training session of the youth teams and the different concepts in youth development. His report had 80 pages that Rolfes had to present to a panel in London – in English of course. He was presented with the diploma at a ceremony in Nyon by Ioan Lupescu, technical director at UEFA and a Werkself player from 1990 to 1996 that included winning the DFB Cup in 1993.
Simon Rolfes returned to Leverkusen in the summer of 2018 and first took over the position of 'Director of Youth and Development’ where he was responsible for the planning and further development of youth work at Kurtekotten. A few months later, on 1 December, he took over as a the new Bayer 04 sporting director as successor to Jonas Boldt. He didn't have to take any roundabout routes for his second career.
Personal stats:
Date and place of birth:
21 January 1982 in Ibbenbüren
Clubs:
TuS Recke, Werder Bremen, SSV Reutlingen, Alemannia Aachen, Bayer 04
Bundesliga appearances:
288
Bundesliga goals:
41
Honours:
26 caps for Germany (two goals), champion of Germany 2004 and DFB Cup winner 2004 with Werder Bremen, DFB Cup runner-up 2009, league runner-up 2011, European Championship runner-up 2008
