During his six-month loan, Martin Hinteregger became the darling of the audience at Eintracht Frankfurt. He would like to change immediately, but now he is back at FC Augsburg. The current situation: the clubs are playing poker, the Frankfurt fans are writing postcards, the Augsburg representatives are whispering – and Hinteregger is silent and is working triple shifts.
In their most important mission of the summer, the fans of Eintracht Frankfurt are now working in two lanes. On the one hand there is the digital campaign with numerous tweets containing the hashtag #FreeHinti. Some of them are provided with quite curious photos: for example a street section of the Tour de France with #FreeHinti glued on.
And then there’s the analog campaign: postcards addressed to the FC Augsburg office, labeled #FreeHinti. Although you don’t actually need a hash tag to send postcards successfully.
The goal of the mission: the liberation of 26-year-old central defender Martin Hinteregger from Augsburg and, as a result, his permanent transfer to Frankfurt.
In the last second half of the season, Hinteregger played on loan in Frankfurt, where he quickly became the crowd favourite. To the sounds of “Hinti Army Now” he was always seen fighting and straddling. “Simply indescribable,” Hinteregger summarized.
What do we do now? Do they come together again, Eintracht and their favourite Hinti? Since Tuesday he has been training normally in Augsburg, where he is still under contract until 2021, while playing poker in the background. Allegedly Frankfurt offers about ten million euros, allegedly Augsburg demands about 13.
With both sums, Hinteregger would replace Djibril Sow as the most expensive newcomer in the club’s history – but according to Frankfurt’s sports director Fredi Bobic, there is currently “radio silence” between the two clubs. Frankfurt is apparently already looking for alternatives, Waldemar Anton von Hannover 96 is mentioned among others.
While poker is played, hashtags are tweeted and postcards are franked, the Augsburg professional team travelled to the village of Heimstetten near Munich on Saturday. There she competed in the so-called Schauinsland Travel Cup and, thanks to a 1-0 final victory against Borussia Mönchengladbach, even won the possibly so-called Schauinsland Travel Cup trophy.
Hinteregger himself wasn’t there. He is still suffering from the after-effects of a broken rib, which he suffered in the last international match of the season with the Austrian national team against North Macedonia. “He is not yet allowed to lead a duel”, explained coach Martin Schmidt in Heimstetten and told that Hinteregger had trained individually in Augsburg instead. “I heard he did very well.”
If Schmidt talks about Hinteregger, it doesn’t sound as if he’s talking about a prisoner. “Very diligent,” he calls him, twice even “very positive.” Schmidt reported on “double and even triple shifts” that Hinteregger is currently completing per day, and then he said: “He was very well received, is a great performer, and is a very flat-headed rider. When I see how often he talks to young players or how often they talk to him, I notice that there are buddies.”
With Florian Niederlechner there is probably no buddy yet, he finally changed himself this summer from SC Freiburg to Augsburg. According to Niederlechner, nothing stands in the way of this: “Everything Martin has done so far is top. He’s a super sympathetic guy and just nice in character.”
This whispering of Schmidt and Niederlechner almost seemed like a charm offensive for Hinteregger – which, given his prehistory in Augsburg, seems rather curious. After Hinteregger had announced last winter that he could say “nothing positive” about Augsburg’s former coach Manuel Baum, the club gave him a record fine within the club. “Someone like that has no place in the team,” explained managing director Sport Stefan Reuter, suspending him.
Reuter has apparently revised this opinion in the meantime, and in the end he even defended Hinteregger and called him trustworthy by his nickname. After the picture had reported that Hinteregger had appeared in Augsburg with a Frankfurt backpack for training, Reuter reassured in the Augsburger Allgemeine: “Hinti told me that it was a backpack of the Austrian national team. He’s got an eagle on him too.”
Hinteregger himself has not made a public statement since his return to Augsburg. But before he went on holiday, he told the Austrian daily Kleine Zeitung: “For me there’s only Frankfurt.” In spite of the Augsburg buddies, nothing has changed in this respect.
