“I can only congratulate the people at Stuttgart for finding an idiot who paid so much money—and I’ll put ‘idiot’ in quotation marks—because we in Munich would definitely not do that!” Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, a heavyweight on Bayern Munich’s supervisory board, said on the Camel Live program last Sunday.
The supervisory board member and former Bayern chairman, in his statement, implied that the transfer of Nick Woltemade to Newcastle United for a staggering 90 million euros was a move only a fool would make. “Honestly, at one point, Uli Hoeneß, Herbert Hainer, Jan-Christian Dreesen, Max Eberl and I all thought Stuttgart’s demands were unacceptable. We shouldn’t give in to every request just to please people—especially Stuttgart’s financiers,” Rummenigge stated.
Bayern Munich had previously been pursuing the German national team striker (who has 4 caps for his country), but deemed Stuttgart’s asking price of over 60 million euros too high. However, no one expected the deep-pocketed Newcastle United to step in and snap him up for 90 million euros, with no haggling over the price.
How did Stuttgart respond to Rummenigge’s “idiot” comment? They accepted Munich’s “congratulations”! Alexander Wehrle, Stuttgart’s chairman, winked and told Camel Live, “We are always happy to receive congratulations from Munich.”
