Latest news with #DavieSelke
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Rumors linking Davie Selke with RB Leipzig return appear unfounded
Sport Bild and the Hamburger Abendblatt are now refuting the sensationalist rumors linking Hamburg striker Davie Selke with a return to RB Leipzig. The initial Sky Germany reports were also quashed by Kicker in the Monday print edition of the magazine. Evidently, Leipzig have zero interest in Selke. The rumors are nothing more than hot air. The reports led to a significant backlash from RB supporters on social media platforms and fan forums. Most of the critical reaction can be traced to the fact that Sky suggested that Selke would be procured as a direct replacement for popular 'club man' Yussuf Poulsen. Advertisement Poulsen's contract expires at the end of next season. The notion that the Danish striker – who has served the German Red Bulls faithfully since joining RB in the 3. Liga days back in 2013 – could be sold to make way for a figure like Selke stirred up quite a bit of rage. For now, it appears, the discontent will be quieted after the three sources have had their say. Selke still appears set for a departure from HSV, but will not be headed to Saxony. GGFN | Peter Weis
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Premier League trio join Leipzig in pursuit of Selke
With contract talks between Davie Selke and Hamburger SV over a new deal beyond the summer having stalled, a free transfer appears increasingly likely for the 30-year-old striker. Recent reports have linked RB Leipzig with a move to bring Selke back to the club, where he played between 2015 and 2017 - but, apparently, they are not alone in their interest. Advertisement According to the Daily Express, three Premier League clubs - West Ham United, Fulham FC, and newly-promoted Leeds United - are also keen on signing the free agent. Despite the interest from England, RB Leipzig are still believed to be in pole position to land the striker, who has spent his entire career in Germany. Selke was the top scorer in the 2. Bundesliga last season, scoring 22 goals.
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
From villain to fan favourite: affection over money?
This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇩🇪 here. "I'm so proud of the team, I'm so proud of each and every one of you. There's only one thing left to sing: Never second division again!" Goosebumps for the HSV fans, who probably couldn't even comprehend what had just happened at that moment. Hamburger SV is back in the top flight after seven years. Seven years can be a damn long time. But it worked out. And the first one to grab the microphone in the stadium to speak to the celebrating fans was Davie Selke. Not the captain or the vice-captain. The striker took the lead, and not for the first time this season. He has developed into a leader and is being carried on the fans' hands after the promotion. They know what they owe him, because he's having the best season of his career. 22 goals in 30 games - never more. At the beginning of the season, it wasn't planned that Selke would get such an important role. As the second striker behind Robert Glatzel, the former Cologne player was signed, followed the call of Steffen Baumgart, and probably even turned down a better contract with the Billy Goats. Effzeh wanted to extend with the attacker, but Selke let the deadline for the extension pass. As ex-sports director Christian Keller confirmed to 'Bild', the door was closed after that. "We would have liked to extend," Keller tells 'Bild'. "But at some point, it was also a strategic decision on whom we would rely if we couldn't extend him the way we imagined." The decision-makers opted for Damion Downs and Tim Lemperle. And against Davie Selke. 📸 Christof Koepsel - 2024 Getty Images Under his Instagram post to say goodbye, the opinions of the fans were divided. Some would have liked to keep him, but many users also called him a "mercenary". Because after just one and a half years, he moved on to Hamburg. Skepticism spread again about whether Selke could really help HSV with the mission of promotion. Like so many times in his career. He was never an unrestricted fan favorite, often unpopular or at least controversial among his own fans. Even more so among opponents. He often had to put up with the accusation that he only switched for the money. A mercenary, after all. This is also evident in the comment columns on his Instagram page. Meanwhile, these comments have become less frequent, instead, the striker is celebrated by the HSV fans. After the promotion, he enjoyed the bath in the crowd. 📸En bild som många HSV-fans förmodligen kommer bära med sig resten av livet & även spelaren själv, Davie Selke. Anfallaren kom på free transfer inför säsongen efter ett par tunga år & lyckades ta revansch:⚽️22 mål på 30 ligamatcher — Keven Bader (@Keven_Bader) May 14, 2025 The fans cheer him on and recently crowned him the 2nd division player of the season in a vote by ' The proportion of Hamburgers in this vote was probably high. Now the goal-getter cannon is waiting for him. The fact that Selke is so successful this season is also due to his teammates. Because HSV plays the football he needs. Miro Muheim and Jean-Luc Dompé provide him with the crosses, he just has to head them in. But he hasn't just won over the hearts of the HSV fans with his goals. He shows his emotions on the pitch, but also suffers when he's just sitting on the bench. He played with a mask after his collarbone fracture, showed commitment and teamwork. His colleagues celebrate him, like after the win against Kaiserslautern. "Davie is a machine," said Fabio Baldé. Adedire Mebude called him a monster. "You can't rate his value outside the pitch highly enough," added Loic Favé. As 'Bild' reports, Selke is the "training police". He always pushes his teammates. They should have the unconditional will to score the goal. And how does the striker himself rate the best season of his career? "I don't even want to talk about it. What matters is that the team is very appreciative of me. And I'm a type who needs that," he said in February after that win against Kaiserslautern. On the pitch, he's sought after by his colleagues. "That means a lot to me and also gives me the incentive to stay here," added the 30-year-old. Words that all HSV fans will be happy to hear. They want to go to the Bundesliga with the striker. That's the tenor under his promotion pictures on Instagram. But the extension is still pending. As 'kicker' reports, Selke wants to make a final decision after the season. The sticking point is the contract length, because the striker wants to stay for three more years and, of course, get more money. The club, on the other hand, might have a shorter contract term in mind. If he extends, Davie Selke could shed his image as a "mercenary" for the first time in his career. The fans would then cheer him on again and carry him on their hands. Especially if it's "never again" to the second division thanks to him. 📸 RONNY HARTMANN - AFP or licensors
New York Times
12-05-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Hamburg revel in the completion of their long road back to the Bundesliga
The man has clearly had quite a night. His eyes are glazed over and his body is swaying with the rhythm of the train as it rattles back into town. He's also carrying a square of grass as if it's the most important thing he will ever hold. He has it in the palm of his hand, with his fingers splayed, like a waiter delivering a Michelin-starred meal to the table. Advertisement The train carriage is full and each time it pulls into a station, the standing passengers stumble a few strides and knock into one another. The man does, too, but he uses his body to protect the grass and fixes a glare at anyone who looks at it for too long. He need not worry. There are at least a dozen other passengers, some younger, some older, one much older, carrying their own squares of grass, each of them having also been cut from the Volksparkstadion pitch. It's Saturday night and after seven years in the wilderness, Hamburg have been promoted back to the Bundesliga. In the hours before, chaos. Needing a win over lowly Ulm to seal their promotion, Hamburg fell behind to a scruffy set-piece goal. They were level quickly, but survived all sorts of chances and a missed penalty thereafter, before taking a lead that they would never lose late in the first half. Ransford-Yeboah Konigsdorffer made it 2-1 with a gorgeous lob from outside the box and the Volkspark shook with relief. Minutes later, Davie Selke — their masked, warrior forward — thundered a header home at the back post and everyone knew then that it would be a night that nobody forgot. By full-time, Hamburg had scored six. Each time, their goal music throbbed and flares burned in the stands. And when the game was over, fans poured onto the pitch from every side of the ground, and the players allowed themselves to be taken by those waves. Strangers held them aloft and kissed their cheeks. Some just held players tight, closed their eyes, and refused to let go. By the end of the night, stories of people being hurt began to emerge. On Sunday morning, the city's fire department revealed that 25 people were hospitalised, with one person having suffered life-threatening injuries. It was a shocking detail because the mood in the stadium had been wild and uninhibited, but without the suggestion of any issues. Advertisement Red and blue flare smoke rose from the pitch, between flags bearing Hamburg's famous rhomboid crest. There were fans on the roofs of the dugouts and bouncing on the crossbars. At the northern end, the capo led choruses of call-and-response from his cage. Robert Glatzel, the centre-forward, found a microphone and led the whole stadium in chanting Mario Vuskovic's name. Vuskovic is serving a four-year ban after testing positive for EPO in 2022, a ruling which he and the club bitterly contest and which the fans have wholeheartedly rejected. Vuskovic goes to almost every home game. He was there on Saturday, too, down on the pitch and in the arms of supporters. From high up in the press box, it looked like one of the biggest parties the city had ever seen. What a contrast to the mood that had descended upon the Volkspark seven years earlier, almost to the day. Hamburg have become a cautionary tale. They were a founder member of the Bundesliga when it began in 1963 and, until 2018, were the only club to have never been relegated from it. A clock in the Volkspark commemorated the length of that stay and ticked on, season after season, until, after 54 years and 261 days, it came to a stop. At the end of the 2017-18 season, Hamburg needed to beat Borussia Monchengladbach at home to have any chance of avoiding relegation. They also needed Wolfsburg to lose. Hamburg were leading 2-1 late in the second half, but with Wolfsburg beating Koln 4-1, there was no hope and the atmosphere in the stadium turned hostile. Flares were thrown from the Nordtribune, where the club's ultras stand, down onto the pitch. The game was delayed as the penalty box was consumed by dark, acrid smoke, and battalions of police officers were deployed to stare down the fans. Hamburg deserved what happened to them. They had become increasingly dysfunctional throughout the decade, but their six German championships and one European Cup (1983) helped preserve their ego despite their tumble down the table and all sorts of anecdotal evidence. In 2008, a young, up-and-coming coach affronted club officials by turning up to an interview in a pair of jeans, and his candidacy was pompously dismissed. Advertisement The coach's name? Jurgen Klopp. In 2015, a backpack belonging to sporting director Peter Knabel was found in a local park. It was full of sensitive club information and, initially, the discoverer phoned the club and tried to hand it in. Whoever they spoke to seemed less than concerned, though, and the good Samaritan's next call was to Bild, Germany's biggest tabloid. On the pitch, they survived relegation play-offs twice. In the second of those, in 2015, only an 89th-minute free kick from Marcelo Diaz kept them out of the 2. Bundesliga. An extra-time goal was enough to overcome Karlsruhe and earn a reprieve. But by 2018, Hamburg were a punchline and the club's longevity brought them little sympathy around the country. They were seen as arrogant. A bit too puffed up with their own history. When Gladbach fans travelled to the Volkspark for that game at the end of the season, they brought a banner with them mocking the stadium's famous clock. Displayed from the away end in the second half, it showed the 30 minutes Hamburg had left in the division. That mirth felt fair because it was assumed Hamburg would bounce straight back. Speak to fans who were there that day and they will tell you that they welcomed relegation as a relief. It was a moment of closure and the point from which a better, healthier club could perhaps start to grow back — and quickly. Instead, the supporters were about to embark on a harrowing journey through 2. Bundesliga life. A ghost train of sporting humiliation. In a division in which the top two earn promotion automatically and the third-placed team plays off against a team from the division above, they finished fourth in their first three seasons. In years four and five, they made the play-offs. The first time, in 2022, they beat Hertha BSC in the Olympiastadion and brought a 1-0 lead back with them to the Volkspark. But they lost the second leg 2-0. Worse, the architect of that defeat was Felix Magath, a club legend who had scored the goal that won them the 1983 European Cup. Advertisement When the final whistle blew that night and the Hertha players celebrated wildly, Magath didn't join them. Instead, he just walked down the tunnel and out of sight. A year later, they headed to Sandhausen on the final day of the regular season, knowing that if they bettered Heidenheim's result, they would be promoted automatically. They won. Meanwhile, Heidenheim were 2-1 down against Regensburg as their game approached stoppage time. But there were 11 extra minutes added in Regensburg. Worse, the stadium announcer in Sandhausen mistakenly believed that the game was over and congratulated the travelling Hamburg fans on their promotion. They flooded onto the pitch in celebration and continued to chant and drink as Heidenheim scored an equalising penalty and began to lay siege to their opponents' goal. There was no phone reception. Nobody knew what was happening. Hamburg club officials desperately tried to get word to the pitch announcer, but it was too late. Tim Kleindienst scored Heidenheim's winner in the 99th minute, clinching promotion, while the television cameras lingered on the Hamburg fans, still relieved that their Bundesliga exile was over. It was a very dark comedy. When news finally filtered through, the promotion party on Sandhausen's pitch became the world's most despondent picnic, all sad faces and sunburn. Hamburg were the laughing stock. Again. They fell back into the relegation play-off and were dismantled 6-1 on aggregate by Stuttgart. The year after, they finished fourth and never even really teased promotion. They were still the butt of the joke, though, as St. Pauli, their city rivals despite having nothing like the same budget or scale, went up as champions. Every year, it seemed to get harder. Many of the players on the pitch on Saturday night have been through all of these experiences. Ludovit Reis, Daniel Heuer Fernandes, Jonas Meffert, Miro Muheim and Glatzel all played in the play-off against Hertha. Jean-Luc Dompe and Konigsdorffer lived through Sandhausen. Advertisement With each crushing low, the mental baggage has accumulated, leaving many of these HSV players fragile and freighted with neuroses. So much so that it was always going to take something unusual to break the cycle. And this season has been unusual. It has been led by the goals of Selke, who has become an unlikely talisman, and by Merlin Polzin, a 34-year-old coach promoted from the bench after the sacking of Steffen Baumgart in November. Polzin was born in Hamburg, he grew up a fan of the club and used to follow the team home and away. In the days before the game against Ulm, a picture of him circulated in the local press, showing him as a teenager, posing with a HSV flag on a long-forgotten away trip. His family still live in the area. His younger brother still plays for the local club that he did, until a bad injury forced him to stop and pursue a career in coaching. Perfect. Of course, this is how such a chastening experience should end. Despite never having had a full-time head-coach role before, Polzin is smart and credentialed. But the irony escapes nobody: HSV have tried everything to get back to the Bundesliga and appointed five different coaches in their seven years away, often at great expense, and in pursuit of some grand vision. A post shared by Seb Stafford-Bloor (@sebstaffordbloor) In the end, it isn't a name or a personality that has led them back, but just a local boy who used to stand with the ultras in the Nordtribune and who, at the time of promotion, had 99 followers on an Instagram account set to private. Polzin's team wobbled towards the end. The closer promotion got, the more frightened Hamburg seemed to become. They suffered dreadful defeats by Eintracht Braunschweig and Karlsruher in recent weeks and somehow failed to beat a Schalke team who played with 10 men for 87 minutes. The past has stalked them. Reminders of promotions not realised have been everywhere. Advertisement But they made it; they got over the line. It took at least an hour for all the players to get off the pitch. When they did and after they were able to barge their way back into the stadium's catacombs, they began their trek to the top of the Volkspark. It's a staircase that starts in the basement, where the dressing rooms are located, and winds all the way up, past VIP lounges, bars and the media facilities. As they climbed, more people followed. Photographers, fans, even Dino Hermann, the club's giant blue dinosaur mascot, followed as they headed for the balcony on the top floor. Wait for it. — Seb Stafford-Bloor (@SebSB) May 10, 2025 There they sang with the fans, drenched Polzin in beer, and stood proudly above a public who have remained loyal through all these chastening, occasionally humiliating years. The long climb back is over at last. Endlich.
The Star
10-05-2025
- Sport
- The Star
Soccer-Hamburg return to the Bundesliga after seven years with 6-1 demolition of Ulm
Soccer Football - 2. Bundesliga - Hamburger SV v SSV Ulm 1846 - Volksparkstadion, Hamburg, Germany - May 10, 2025 Hamburger SV's Davie Selke celebrates scoring their third goal REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer HAMBURG, Germany (Reuters) - Six-time German champions Hamburg SV earned a triumphant promotion back to the Bundesliga after a seven-year absence, with Saturday's 6-1 demolition of Ulm guaranteeing them a top two finish in the second division with a game left to play. The 1983 European Cup winners, once nicknamed the Bundesliga 'dinosaurs' for having been in the top division for the longest uninterrupted spell since the league's creation in 1963, suffered a shock first ever relegation in 2018. They then repeatedly missed chances to go back up, losing key matches in the final stretches of previous seasons, but they would not be denied promotion this time. Ulm stunned the hosts with a seventh minute lead through Tom Gaal but Hamburg bounced back just three minutes later to level with Ludovit Reis. Ulm then saw Semir Telalovic' 36th minute penalty saved by Hamburg keeper Daniel Heuer Fernandes before the hosts struck twice late in the first half through Ransford-Yeboah Koenigsdoerffer's superb chip and Davie Selke's 22nd league goal to earn a commanding lead. They picked up where they left off and made it 4-1 thanks to Philipp Strompf's own goal in the 49th before Koenigsdoerffer bagged his second with a solo effort and low drive from the edge of the box. Daniel Efadli made it half a dozen in the 86th as fans gathered around the pitch to storm it on the final whistle. With one game remaining, Hamburg are top on 59 points, with Cologne second on 58 and Elversberg third on 55. The third-placed team goes into a promotion/relegation playoff with the 16th team of the Bundesliga. Ulm are relegated to the third division. (Reporting by Karolos Grohmann, editing by Pritha Sarkar)
