Niklas Süle Reflects on Extreme Weight Cuts in Football
Niklas Süle sat down to announce the end of his career and, almost casually, dropped a story that said more about elite football than any farewell speech ever could.
On the “Spielmacher” podcast, the former Bayern Munich defender pulled back the curtain on life under Jupp Heynckes – and on the lengths he went to in order to satisfy the scales.
The weekly weight cut
“Jupp Heynckes was a tremendous mentor to me. I played under him, but he also addressed the issue of weight. We had weigh-ins at Bayern on Thursdays. I didn’t eat anything all Wednesday, I fasted the whole day. And every evening at home, I went to the sauna – wearing a raincoat,” Süle recalled, in quotes captured by @iMiaSanMia.
The image is stark. A Bundesliga star, not a boxer in a training camp, starving himself midweek and sweating it out in his basement sauna.
“The next day, I weighed two and a half kilos less. That’s extreme. The sauna was in the basement. After a day without food and in the sauna wearing a raincoat, I had to go up three flights of stairs to our bedroom. I opened the window, leaned out, and breathed for ten minutes because I thought I was going to faint.
“Then I played at the weekend, we won, and Heynckes said to me: ‘See? You played much better now.’ But the reality is that my weight was exactly the same as before.”
It was a fighter’s weight cut, repeated every week. By the time the ball rolled on the weekend, Süle’s body had already rebounded to its natural mark. The numbers on Thursday had been a mirage.
A career under the microscope
The method was wild. It was also a window into a career that never escaped the conversation about weight and fitness.
Süle’s physical profile always drew attention. At his peak, he was a rare package: towering, quick across the ground, and surprisingly light on the ball. When Bayern pushed him to right-back, he looked like a bouncer moonlighting as a full-back, yet he covered the flank with real pace and timing. In the center of defense, he became a clearing machine – strong enough to wrestle with the biggest strikers, quick enough to chase down forwards who usually lived off the space behind a back line.
There were nights when he looked like one of the most dominant defenders in Europe. On those nights, the debate about his weight faded into the background.
But it never disappeared. The “fitness issue” followed him from club to club, season to season, like a permanent footnote to his performances. Every dip in form, every injury, every heavy touch seemed to be dragged back to the same question: could he have squeezed more from that frame?
The unanswerable question
Some players simply defy the scales. They carry extra weight, yet their engines never stall, their careers never blink. Maybe Süle was one of them, a defender whose game depended more on timing, reading of the play, and raw strength than on a perfect body-fat percentage.
Or maybe that’s the great frustration of his story. Maybe a different relationship with his own body – and with the expectations around it – might have pushed him into an even higher bracket of defenders, beyond the flashes of dominance into something truly sustained.
We will never know. What we do know is that, in the basement of his home, on countless Wednesdays, a top-level international defender was cutting weight like an MMA fighter just to satisfy a Thursday ritual.
He still played. He still won. He still heard his coach say, “See? You played much better now.”
And all the while, the scale said nothing about the defender he really was – or the one he might have become.
