In the Phrasenmäher podcast, Fabien Hürzeler reports on talks with BVB legend Mats Hummels, whom he almost brought to the island in the summer.

Mats Hummels was one of the key players in BVB’s success on their way to the Champions League final. However, his current season with his new club AS Roma is anything but rosy – should he have made a different decision in the summer?

In the podcast “Phrasenmäher,” St. Pauli’s promotion coach Fabian Hürzeler, who took over the reins at Premier League club Brighton & Hove Albion in the summer, reports on talks with the veteran player. “Hummels’ numbers are very good. He’s still a top 10, top 15 player in the world based on last season’s data,” explains the 31-year-old coaching talent. According to Henning Feindt, the host of Phrasenmäher, Hummels has already passed the radiological medical check for the Premier League club.

But as we all know, Hummels moved to Italy, not to England. “It’s not just about the numbers and data. It also has to be a good fit for the team and for the entire system,” explains Hürzeler. And Hummels is known to have a strong personality, which is obviously not always easy to integrate into a team structure.

In the end, this was also a potential problem, in addition to the short notice of the transfer. “And indeed, when you bring in a winner, a winner like Mats Hummels, you also have to look at who you take out of the system to maintain the structure. And that wasn’t possible in such a short time.”

In his first game under Roma’s new coach Claudio Ranieri, Hummels finally got to prove his skills in Serie A again. He came on as a substitute against SSC Napoli on Sunday. But even in the 0-1 defeat to the 2022/23 Serie A champions, he did not cut a good figure—Romelu Lukaku was closer to the ball than the 36-year-old former BVB captain when the winning goal was scored, and he then went on to score the 1-0 winner.