Admission to this game is free. The match is being played at Kurtekotten as the Ulrich Haberland Stadium is currently undergoing repair.
It will be the first outing for the team managed by the new head coach Heiko Herrlich who holds his first training session on Wednesday at 10.30 CET. This follows the two days of medical performance tests for his players. The VfB Speldorf team, who finished last season as runners-up in the state Landesliga and have been promoted to the Lower Rhine Oberliga, are at home in Mülheim an der Ruhr. Their coach is the former Schalke pro Christian Mikolajczak (36). He won the DFB cup and finished runner-up in the Bundesliga in 2001. After his playing career, that also took into Vietnam, Mikolajczak trained to be a paramedic and now works as a firefighter in Oberhausen.
Bayer 04 Leverkusen will have to manage without centre-back Edmond Tapsoba in the coming weeks. The Burkina Faso international returned to the Werkself from the Africa Cup of Nations in Morocco with a muscle injury.
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The Werkself are away to Hamburg SV at the end of the Hinrunde in the 2025/26 Bundesliga campaign. The match at the newly promoted club is on Tuesday night, 13 January (kick-off: 20:30 CET). Ahead of the first encounter with HSV since 2018, Kasper Hjulmand spoke about the strengths of the opponents, lessons learnt from the home defeat against VfB Stuttgart and provided a squad update.
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In Germany, the temperatures are currently around zero, leaving even professional footballers freezing - but not the Bayer 04 Women. Roberto Pätzold's team have fled the cold to the south and are preparing for the second half of the season at a training camp in the Algarve, almost 2,000 kilometres away from home as the crow flies. The Leverkusen squad landed in Faro on Saturday morning and have already completed the first three training sessions over the weekend.
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It was a disappointing Saturday night. The Werkself lost 4-1 to VfB Stuttgart to start the new year on Bundesliga matchday 16 in 2025/26, a result that left both players and fans disappointed. "We played without any passion," said Alejandro Grimaldo honestly afterwards. Teammate Jarell Quansah was even more self-critical, emphasising: "We were miles off it in the first half. You can't put in a performance like that, especially in front of our own fans and I can only apologise to them, to be honest." Read on for the reaction, facts and stats from the clash with VfB Stuttgart in the Werkself review.
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