Alfredo Morales completes his path back to the Bundesliga with Ingolstadt
It had to end in Ingolstadt. There were other opportunities to secure promotion as the 2.Bundesliga season wound to a close, but this moment -- the penultimate match against RB Leipzig at Audi Sportpark -- felt perhaps the most appropriate for this club and these players to finish the job and lift the title at last.
Alfredo Morales started his journey toward the Bundesliga here a couple of seasons ago. He left the bright lights of his native Berlin for a small city about an hour north of Munich, a place where the many of the inhabitants made luxury cars and the local football club plotted for an unlikely top-flight future.
“It was a plan I made one-and-a-half years ago to go there from a Bundesliga club to build something,” Morales explained while on international duty in March. “It’s a very good team. Everything is unbelievable. The facilities, everything, is very good. For the 2.Bundesliga, it’s almost too much.”
The construction process required some explanation to everyone on the outside. Morales swapped the frustration of a place on the periphery at Hertha Berlin -- a club promoted to the Bundesliga as champions right around the time he left -- for the opportunity to feature regularly at a lower level for a club with no top-flight experience and a modest history cobbled together since its formation in 2004.
Morales bet on his talent when he made the move down the ladder. He thought he could push himself farther by moving to Ingolstadt and playing week after week for the ambitious side. He wanted to grab control of his career, even if it meant creating a longer road toward his ultimate objectives and waiting to add to his eight Bundesliga appearances.
“What happened with Alfredo was, two or three years ago, he was in and out at Hertha Berlin,” U.S. coach Jurgen Klinsmann said as he reflected on Morales’ progression prior to the friendly against Switzerland. “They said he was their biggest talent, from talking to the coach at the club at that time. But, for whatever reason, it didn’t click. He was in. He was out. He got frustrated. And then, suddenly, he made the decision to go to Ingolstadt. I thought, ‘Woah, why is he making a step back? We want him to make a step up into the Bundesliga starting lineup every week.’ I spoke to him and he said, ‘Coach, I don’t feel I’m getting further right now. I’d rather make a step back to make two forward.’ I said, ‘Fair enough, we’ll be there, we’ll watch.’”
Klinsmann and his staff monitored Morales carefully and saw Morales blossom as he settled into his new surroundings. The 25-year-old established himself as a critical component in the cosmopolitan side shaped by Austrian manager Ralph Hasenhüttl upon his arrival in October 2013. He nurtured his evident technical ability and slotted onto the left side of midfield in Hasenhüttl’s 4-3-3 setup.
The first season under Hasenhüttl focused on consolidation after Ingolstadt stumbled at the start of the campaign under former boss Marco Kurz. This season offered a chance to start fresh with a revamped squad -- the influential Australian forward Mathew Leckie arrived from FSV Frankfurt during the summer -- and mount a genuine push for promotion.
Morales missed just one game for Ingolstadt this season as the club secured the 2. Bundesliga title with one round remaining.
Those measures paid off with a bright start to the campaign and a place at the top of the table. Morales entrenched himself in a ruthlessly professional side capable of procuring points consistently (Ingolstadt has picked up points in 27 of 29 away matches since Hasenhüttl took charge and has lost just four times this season) and sharing the burden throughout the squad (no player has reached 10 goals this season, though there is one round left to play). He played a significant part as Ingolstadt marched toward the Bundesliga.
“They had a tremendous first part of the season,” Klinsmann said. “He had a tremendous season last year. He became one of their key players. Speaking with the coach – who is a friend of Andi (Herzog, U.S. assistant and under-23 coach) – we always got the messages. We saw that he got more confident, more composed on the ball. He’s very gifted technically.”
There is no method to measure how Morales might have progressed if he had remained in Berlin, but there is a way to assess how this move to Ingolstadt influenced his career. In that sense, the triumph over RB Leipzig placed the success of the move in stark relief.
Morales’ success in Ingolstadt paved a route toward a place in Klinsmann’s squad and a return to the Bundesliga. He relied on his ability and his confidence to carry him down an unorthodox path toward his goals. He reaped the desired rewards when the final whistle sounded on Sunday.
“It’s always necessary to take a step back to make two in front,” Morales said as he reflected on this magical season a few weeks ago. “Everything just happened like I said. I wanted everything like this. And everything came true.”