A Name to Remember: Marko Marin

By: Jan | May 22nd, 2008

This feature is long over due. Marko Marin is a 19 year old youngster playing for Borussia Mönchengladbach. He debuted in the Bundesliga late in the 2006/2007 season. He came on as a substitute in a game against Eintracht Frankfurt and crowned his cameo with an assist, which helped Gladbach to a last minute 1-1 draw. At this point Gladbach were comfortably sitting at the wrong end of the table, and just one point against Frankfurt saw them trailing five points from safety already. Gladbach got relegated, which - with the benefit of hindsight - probably did the club more good than harm. They replaced sporting director Peter Pander with former German international Christian Ziege, who built a second division squad, that would turn out to be stronger than Gladbach’s previous first division squad. And Marin became a key player in this new team.

Marin is an attacking midfielder of lilliputian dimensions with excellent technical skills and a high amount of creativity. All of which he started to put on display on a weekly basis in the second Bundesliga. Yet, while it was generally fun to watch what he was doing and to guess what he might be doing next, his tricks earned him only a few goals in return. In the first half of the season Marin couldn’t find the back of the net and supplied just five assists. But there was more than enough on display to be optimistic, that it would click in due time. And it clicked. In the last 13 second Bundesliga matches Marin scored four goals and provided 8 assists - or in other words 12 scorer points in 13 matches.

Gladbach dominated the second Bundesliga and got promoted with relative ease and the magic dwarf Marin should be an excellent addition to the Bundesliga’s trio of magic mouse Diego, littler prankster Ribery and little angel van der Vaart. Although the latter might be poised to pose with a shirt of another club and talk about his grandpa soon again.

Marin also impressed on almost all of Germany’s youth national teams up to the U21, where he debuted last year. His nomination for Jogi Löw’s provisional Euro squad still came as a bit of a surprise. Not so much for Löw, who said he only needed to watch Marin play for 10 minutes to make his mind up. The following video gives you a good idea of what Marin has been doing all season. It’s only 3:55 min, so I suggest you watch it roughly 2.5 times to be on Jogi Löw’s level.