Peter Bosz welcomed his players back to the training ground on Monday afternoon and he was able to gain first impressions of the fitness of his team. After another intensive session on Tuesday, the performance tests on Thursday and a final training session on Friday, the week will be rounded off with the friendly against the Regional League side. For the Werkself, a number of players, who have not played much recently, plus one or two youth players may get the chance to show what they can do. The head coach is currently missing the international players who were given extended leave due to their time away on international duty. Kai Havertz, Lukas Hradecky, Tin Jedvaj, Julian Baumgartlinger, Aleksandar Dragovic, Jonathan Tah, Charles Aránguiz and Leon Bailey will all rejoin the squad at the training camp (15 to 21 July in Zell am See–Kaprun).
Tickets are still available via the Wuppertaler SV website for this weekend’s friendly at the Stadion am Zoo (Hubertusallee 4, 42117 Wuppertal).
Our opponents:
Last season, Wuppertaler SV finished eleventh in the Regional League West – the fourth tier of German football. The club is 30 kilometres away from Leverkusen as the crow flies and the two sides faced each other last summer with the Werkself running out comfortable winners with a 2-0 victory. The 25 competitive encounters (Oberliga, Regional League, second division) are a good while ago: Between 1962 and 1979 the Werkself won nine of the meetings (seven draws). The biggest success for the Wuppertal side is even further back: WSV were promoted to the Bundesliga in 1972 and a year later competed in the UEFA Cup. The undisputed low point followed in 2013 with the application for bankruptcy and the associated relegation to the fourth division where Wuppertal have been again since the 2016/17 season.
In the previous game against RB Leipzig in December last year, the Werkself turned came from behind to win 3-1 and further improved Leverkusen's already strong record against the Red Bulls. Montrell Culbreath stood out with his first goal on his debut for the Black and Reds. While the 18-year-old would certainly like to score a second goal against Leipzig on Saturday night, the attack-minded visitors come to the BayArena in confident mood after five Bundesliga victories in a row. The Nordkurve12 supporters group knows the Werkself will therefore once again be reliant on the vociferous support of the fans, and has once again called for the ‘Finally Red’ campaign in the run-in. Today’s matchday news.
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Video games manufacturer Electronic Arts (EA), together with the German Football League (DFL), announced the top male and female selections for the 2025/26 Bundesliga season this week. Bayer 04 striker Vanessa Fudalla is in the starting eleven of the women's "Team of the Season". Alejandro Grimaldo and Aleix Garcia have been selected as bench players in the men's team.
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This special event showed once again how strong Bayer 04 are as a team: As part of ‘BarmeniaGothaer gives joy’, the Werkself players Edmond Tapsoba, Ibrahim Maza and Christian Kofane supported the sale of individually designed T-shirts for a good cause at the Fanwelt on Thursday. Several hundred fans came to take part in the charity campaign. Leverkusen's main sponsor BarmeniaGothaer donated the proceeds to the Fondation Edmond Tapsoba, which helps people in Tapsoba's home country of Burkina Faso in their challenging everyday lives.
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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 personalised 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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