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.
Strengthening the Bayer 04 Leverkusen youth teams: Konstantinos Kotsifakis will join the Werkself from Bundesliga 2 club Hertha Berlin for the 2026/27 season, where he will be a permanent member of the Leverkusen U19 coaching set-up. The German-Greek will also take on an operational role in coaching the Bayer 04 Future Team. The 29-year-old was most recently head coach of the U17s at Hertha Berlin.
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Another award for the Bayer 04 head groundsman and staff: After coming top in the 2021/22, 2022/23 and 2024/25 seasons, the BayArena pitch came second in the Bundesliga Pitch of the Year ranking for the 2025/26 season. VfL Wolfsburg secured the top spot this year, with TSG Hoffenheim in third place.
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Opening opponents, derby weekends, the opponents in the season finale: This information and more will be available to Bayer 04 fans on Thursday, 2 July, when the 2026/27 Bundesliga fixture list is published.
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Rüdiger Vollborn has been at the club for 40 years, he holds the record number of Bundesliga appearances for the club (401) and is the only Bayer 04 player to have won both the UEFA Cup (1988) and the DFB Pokal (1993). And the Berliner stayed with the Werkself after ending his impressive playing career as he worked as a goalkeeping coach for the following nine years. Vollborn now works under the Bayer Cross as a fan liaison officer and club archivist. Since February 2021, the personal Black and Red lexicon takes Werkself fans under the heading of 'Rudi recounts...' on a brief trip through the history of Bayer 04 every month…
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