A year and a half before his move to Borussia Dortmund II in the 3rd division, attacker Justin Njinmah almost hung up his football boots.

Justin Njinmah will probably remember 10 September for a long time. On the sixth matchday, Borussia Dortmund lost 3-0 to former coach Marco Rose and RB Leipzig, but he himself was substituted in the 69th minute and celebrated his unexpected Bundesliga debut.

After all, the striker was already on the verge of retiring, as he told the “Athletes Room” podcast. 2020 was that, he said. He was under contract with Holstein Kiel, but played mainly for the second team. After he got injured in the preparation and he had finally fought his way back to the team, the Corona pandemic came. “That was the time in my life when I struggled the most,” “Deichstube” quotes from the podcast. “That’s when I really thought, OK, maybe I’ll just quit now. Not because I didn’t believe in myself, but just because I didn’t think it was possible to turn pro anymore.”

He was 19 years old at the time. The Hamburg native continued to play. But his advisor then placed him with the second team of Werder Bremen. A stroke of luck for Njinmah, because there he finally experienced the long-awaited breakthrough at senior level. With 14 goals and six assists in 18 Regionalliga-Nord games for the Werder U23, he recommended himself for a professional contract and was loaned to Borussia Dortmund II for a year and a half.

“Of course I would have liked to play in the second division. I think I could have done that and helped Werder,” says Njinmah. “But with the loan, everything fell into place. Now, in retrospect, I don’t regret it anyway.” After all, he now also has his first Bundesliga game under his belt.

Whether others could at least be added in black and yellow will apparently be decided in the spring, as “Deichstube” continues to write. BVB has an option to buy, according to Kicker this is in the seven-figure range. In any case, Njinmah is a regular in coach Christian Preußer’s third league squad. In 30 games for BVB II, he scored seven goals himself and set up three others.