Thought I was a rat: ex-player hits out at Sandro Wagner

After Sandro Wagner was dismissed by FC Augsburg in 2025, he has now found a new coaching job. Starting next week, he will be the new head coach of Hannover 96.

It is already well known that the extroverted football professional occasionally rubs people the wrong way. A former player has now spoken out with serious accusations and did not have a single good word to say about Wagner.

The trigger was two friendly matches in preparation for the 2025/26 season. Mads Pedersen, who now plays for Hertha, spoke about the conflict in a major interview with the Danish outlet ‘Bold.dk’. After a long injury layoff, the Dane played the full 90 minutes in the friendly against Pisa. However, in the match against Sunderland the next day, he was supposed to come on as a substitute again. “I tried to warm up, but when I attempted a sprint, I got a cramp in my thigh,” Pedersen recalled.

Rats in the locker room?

He then asked Wagner not to bring him on, which made him very angry. “The relationship between me and Sandro Wagner got worse week by week. During one match, he took off a left-back but didn’t put me on, and unrest started to build within the team,” the Dane also said. Wagner dropped the defender from the matchday squad, even though, according to his own account, he had been training well. But that did not seem to matter to his coach. Instead, the situation kept escalating.

“It really picked up speed, and then suddenly he claimed I was a rat, to put it nicely. Every time we met, he said there were rats in the dressing room, and there were two of us players who knew exactly who he was trying to hint at. Because we were the ones who were never in the matchday squad,” Pedersen said. He did not name the second player, but according to a report by ‘t-online’, the description could fit Arne Maier.

He said he could not understand the accusation at all and thought to himself: “What the hell are you talking about? We have absolutely no contact with the media or anything like that.” For that reason, he confronted Wagner about the accusation, but the coach claimed it had nothing to do with that.

“A few days passed, and then the other player and I were completely thrown out of the team. We were completely removed from the dressing room; we were told to pack our things and asked to leave,” the new Hertha player continued. He had to train with the second team, which plays in the Regionalliga, and was no longer allowed to enter the first team’s training ground. Because of this, lawyers were brought in.

It took four weeks before the Dane was allowed to train again with Augsburg’s first-team players. The club, meanwhile, asked Wagner to apologize to his player. “A week later, he was dismissed. He had lost the locker room,” the defender recalled.

Although Pedersen remembers his time in Augsburg fondly, Wagner’s actions have also left scratches on the overall positive picture. That is why he decided to move in the summer and is now helping keep things tight at the back for Hertha. He is set to reunite with his former coach at the beginning of December, when Hertha visit Hannover 96.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇩🇪 here.