From a city smaller than the Yad Eliyahu neighborhood: The meteoric rise of the Bundesliga sensation
How do you say Cinderella in German? Elversberg. This is how a modest team from the regional league, representing a city of 13,000 residents whose locker room used to be in a garage basement, became a Bundesliga club that dismantles Bayer Leverkusen 3:2 with attacking and captivating football.
Elversberg needed only eight minutes to score the first goal (Lukas Petkov) in its history in the Bundesliga. A minute later they scored the second (Cole Campbell), and at the end of the match against Leverkusen, the 2024 league champion, they managed to stop a comeback attempt and won 3:2 (the third was scored by David Mokwa). The victory landed the newcomer in sixth place in the league table after the first round of matches, with only goal difference separating them from the leader, Bayern Munich.
Just to get some initial perspective on the sensation that is Elversberg, the "Cinderella" whose internal clock is stuck at 11:59: it is a city of 13,000 residents (so small that it doesn't even have a train station) compared to Leverkusen with 170,000, its budget is 31 million euros, compared to 205 million euros for Leverkusen. Leverkusen is fully owned by the international pharmaceutical corporation "Bayer". Frank Holzer, CEO of the board and the living and financial spirit behind the huge success of Elversberg in recent years, is the owner of Ursapharm, a German pharmaceutical company.
The Path to Success
It all started with a scout. For years, Elversberg was just another team on the German football map. They experienced a promotion to the third league and an immediate relegation in 2013, but apart from that year, they spent their Saturdays mainly in the regional league, and it was a kind of hobby for Holzer, a former player who sometimes also served as the team's coach. The current Cinderella story of Elversberg began in 2022, when the team rose again to the third league. A year later, they continued the ascent and rose to the second league.
After a year of acclimatization in the second league, they reached third place in 2025 and competed against Heidenheim for a place in the Bundesliga. Elversberg lost in the second leg due to a goal in the final minutes of the match, but instead of breaking, they finished last season in second place in the league, the place from which one rises directly to the first league. This meteoric rise is not exactly a new story. Hoffenheim and Leipzig took a similar path, but unlike these two teams, which are driven by huge international concerns (SAP and Red Bull, respectively), and therefore hated by many fans in Germany who see them as an artificial marketing product, Elversberg is a team that belongs to the city, with an almost family atmosphere.
To understand how this happened, one needs to go back to 2017, when Nils-Ole Book arrives at the team. Elversberg signs him as a scout, he turns out to have sharp senses for spotting promising talents at a low salary, and within a year he is upgraded to be the club's sporting director. At the same time, coach Horst Steffen also arrives at the club. They become "McCartney-Lennon": one signs and loans, negotiates, evaluates and decides, the other nurtures them, turns them from individuals into a team.
After the painful loss against Heidenheim, Steffen moved to coach Werder Bremen from the Bundesliga, and was fired already in the middle of the season. Teams from the first league suddenly put Elversberg on the radar and lured players, everything was ready for a kind of crash, but Book doesn't let it happen. He brings in coach Vincent Wagner who continues the attacking ideology, loans and signs new players, and instead of crashing, Elversberg finds itself in the first league. In the summer, Book signed a contract that made him the sporting director of Borussia Dortmund.
Now, the pessimists claimed, the tiny club has no chance. It took Elversberg eight minutes to blow up this balloon too, and prove that the club is more than one name or another, and it stands on very, very stable infrastructure. It is almost inconceivable that in less than two weeks Harry Kane and Michael Olise will prepare for a match in the club's locker rooms. On the other hand, these are luxurious rooms compared to what was used in the past as a locker room: a basement of a nearby garage.
"The rise to the Bundesliga was like landing on the moon for us. Now we want to reach Mars," Wagner said in the past. In two weeks, Bayern Munich will arrive at the stadium in Elversberg and try to bring his team back to earth.
