Childhood dream come true | OneFootball

A closer look at new signing Younes Ebnoutalib, a street footballer who has risen from the fourth tier to the Bundesliga inside the last 12 months.

The ink on the contract is dry – even if his eyes weren’t at the moment of signing. “I had to fight back the tears earlier,” Younes Ebnoutalib admitted shortly after putting pen to paper on his contract, which runs until 2031. 

Here are 11 things to know about Eintracht Frankfurt’s new No.11.

1) Press reaction

The Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper described him as a man “with real fire in his heart”; Spiegel Onlinehailed “the meteoric rise of Ebnoutalib”; and Bild ran with the headline: “The Ebnoutalib fairytale”.

2) Fourth tier to top tier in a year

Ebnoutalib’s story may seem like a fairytale but it is no work of fiction. At the beginning of 2025 he moved from fourth-tier side FC Gießen to second-division outfit SV Elversberg. 

After narrowly missing out on promotion to the Bundesliga via the play-offs at the end of last season, Ebnoutalib thrust himself into the spotlight in the first half of the 2025/26 Bundesliga 2 campaign with a league-high 12 goals. Eintracht took note and signed him, completing Ebnoutalib’s journey from the fourth division to the Bundesliga inside the space of 12 months.3) Unfortunate spell in Italy 

Few could have predicted such a trajectory – especially at such a furious pace. A Frankfurt native, he played at Kalbach, Heddernheim, Rot-Weiss Frankfurt and Wehen Wiesbaden as a youngster before joining Italian side FC Perugia with his brother Ilias in July 2023. However, he then suffered a fractured metatarsal. 

The forward returned to Hesse and FC Gießen in the summer of 2024, a move he describes as being “very, very important” for him: “I was coming back from a long-term injury. Things didn’t go so well for me in Perugia, and mentally it was tough. In Gießen, I found my feet again.”

4) Principles and values

That is not to say that things simply clicked back into place for him in the fourth division. “It wasn’t an immediate rise,” he said. “But everyone believed in me, and I tried to give something back by performing well and scoring goals.” As such, the winter signing told EintrachtTV that he believes “perseverance” to be the most important virtue in football, alongside “keeping your feet on the ground”. 

5) Sporting family

In addition to those attributes, playing high-level sport actually runs in the Ebnoutalib family. His brother is a centre-back for Hannover 96’s reserve team, his mother is a former handball player, and his father – who moved from Morocco to Frankfurt in 1990 – became European taekwondo champion in 2000 and won the silver medal in that discipline at the Sydney Olympics that same year.

6) Martial arts training

Younes benefitted from such expertise as a child, learning taekwondo from his dad alongside his brother and sister. “It still helps me today in terms of my athleticism,” says Ebnoutalib. 

7) Frankfurt native and street footballer 

Ebnoutalib’s footballing ability owes much to kicking a ball around with friends on the streets of Frankfurt as a youngster.

8) Playing style

All of which contributed to the 22-year-old becoming “one of the most exciting German strikers right now,” according to sporting director Timmo Hardung. “He’s also a well-rounded player. Not just in terms of his physical presence, but also his footballing quality, his work rate and his dynamism, which are all qualities you want in a forward.”

9) Reunion with Baum

Elias Baum gained first-hand experience of those qualities during his six-month loan spell at Elversberg. Ebnoutalib is particularly looking forward to seeing “Baumi” again; he was also the first person he spoke to, “because I knew we both come from Frankfurt”.

10) Training picture with Trapp

Ebnoutalib is unlikely to be reunited with another fellow Saarland native any time soon – at least not in the dressing room. When he paid a visit to training with his brother and mother, Kevin Trapp, who spent a decade as the Eagles’ goalkeeper and was captain until last season, was still at Eintracht, and the excited guest even managed to get a photo with ‘Trappo’.

11) From fan to player

Now a selfie with Ebnoutalib himself will be a sought-after memento for fans. As an Eintracht Frankfurt player, he will take part in training from 2 January onwards, ahead of the team’s first game of the year on 9 January at Deutsche Bank Park. A childhood dream come true.