Eight months ago Maximilian Entrup would have expected to be watching Euro 2024 on television.
The striker may have been scoring pretty regularly in the Austrian Bundesliga and making a bit of a name for himself, but he was playing for an unfashionable, small team in TSV Hartberg (average attendance 3,260) competing in just their sixth top-flight campaign — all since 2018.
Plus, Entrup was 26, he had never been capped or played a full season of top-flight football in his career. Austria had players from Bayern Munich, Inter Milan and Borussia Dortmund, but Hartberg?
And yet, here he is in Germany, part of a squad that will on Tuesday aim to go further in a major tournament than any Austrian team has since 1982.
Entrup’s story is a pretty remarkable one. It has been called a fairytale with good reason.
His senior career began unassumingly enough as a burgeoning teenage striker who earned a move to Rapid Vienna from second-tier side FAC.
Entrup, having just turned 19, looked set for his big break with the first team. Then, Rapid Vienna fans made a discovery that would indelibly change Entrup’s career path; he had played in the youth ranks of their hated rivals Austria Vienna. More pertinently, he had been a member of their ultras fan group, Infernos.
The rivalry between the two clubs is bitter, fractious, violent and hate-fuelled. It is believed to be one of the most-played derbies in the world, given that neither team has ever been relegated. The fanbase is mostly split along geographical lines (Rapid in the north of the city, Austria to the south), but traditionally, Entrup’s club Rapid were the team of the working classes with Austria representing the middle class.
As recently as February, Rapid Vienna players were filmed singing homophobic chants following a win over Austria Vienna, leading to three being dropped from the national team by manager Ralf Rangnick.
It is among this sea of loathing that Entrup’s backstory permeated. Rapid’s ultras decided Entrup’s allegiances, historic or otherwise, were unacceptable.
“The green hell will become an inferno for you,” one banner read at a Rapid match. A firecracker was thrown in the direction of the substitutes’ bench Entrup was sat on.
“I won’t let the boy get ruined,” Rapid’s sports director Andreas Muller said at the time. “It’s not an easy story, but we shouldn’t make it a big issue.”
Within two years, Entrup’s contract had been terminated.
“It took me a while to process it, but I’ve become stronger and more mature,” Entrup later said. “You shouldn’t let it get you down.”
He played just three games for Rapid. The club loaned him to fellow top-flight side St Polten where he failed to score in seven appearances but, crucially, first met Hartberg manager Markus Schopp.
That was for the future, but after being released in 2018 aged 21, Entrup’s career was going nowhere fast.
He went down the leagues, first to SV Lafnitz in the second tier where he played for two seasons with little success, scoring just five goals.
Then in 2020 he went even lower, to the Austrian regional leagues and FCM Traiskirchen. Four years after breaking into the Rapid Vienna first team at the pinnacle of Austrian football, Entrup was in the wilderness.
Entrup’s pace and physicality appealed to Rangnick (Christian Hofer/Getty Images)
The lower level he was playing at meant he missed the entire 2020-21 season as it was wiped out by the pandemic. He began training as a PE teacher at the Federal Sports Academy Vienna as a back-up career.
Then in 2021-22 the goals started to come again; eight in 13 for Traiskirchen, which caught the eye of fellow Regional League East team Marchfeld Donauauen who signed Entrup halfway through the campaign.
For context, Marchfeld Donauauen do not even have an English Wikipedia page and Entrup, who is at Euro 2024 in a squad tipped as outsiders to win the tournament, was still playing for them as recently as May 2023.
It was at Marchfeld Donauauen, playing at Aulandstadion Mannsdorf with its 200 seats, that Entrup began to make a name for himself again; 10 in his first 10 appearances, then 21 goals in 27 games the following season.
That form led to a call from his old assistant manager at St Polten, Schopp, who was now managing struggling Hartberg in the Austrian Bundesliga.
“I enjoy working with players like that because they simply want to take their last chance one more time,” Schopp said when signing Entrup.
“It was important for him to find himself again in this environment of the Regional League East.”
Entrup had earned his way back to the top flight — and his incremental rise continued. Hartberg had struggled for goals in 2022-23, only scoring 39 in 32 games and narrowly avoided relegation, but in Entrup’s first eight matches he scored eight times.
“It’s a great story, simply a fairytale,” Hartberg managing director Erich Korherr said.
Amid the fairytale, a return to the scene of his personal hell; matchday three, Rapid Vienna v Hartberg.
Entrup prepared for the match by speaking to a psychologist who helped him block out the inevitable abuse from fans who had not forgotten him, nor forgiven him for his Austria Vienna past.
They booed and whistled his every touch, they insulted him, they sang derogatory songs about him. He did not score to silence them, but Hartberg did to win 1-0.
“There aren’t many better victories than here in Vienna,” he said. “It was no problem for me. As a professional footballer, you feel like you get abused in every stadium if you are on the opposing team. You have to deal with that. You can hear the chants — but I’m above that.”
Then in November last year, another life-changing phonecall, this time from Rangnick. Entrup was so surprised his phone nearly fell out of his hand.
Scoring 39 goals in his previous 45 appearances at various levels had attracted the attention of Austria’s manager and so, five months after leaving the regional leagues, Entrup was called up by the national team.
“It was a really nice conversation,” Entrup said. “I was really nervous, he explained to me why I was there because of my height (6ft 1in) and sprinting strength. It’s still a dream that is now becoming reality. A huge honour, somehow unreal and surreal. Especially with my story.”
Yes, his story, for which new chapters are being written at quite a pace.
Entrup made a brief debut as a late substitute against Germany in November, then in March he was back in the squad and again a late sub, this time scoring the final goal in a 6-1 thrashing of Turkey when he headed in Patrick Wimmer’s cross.
Entrup celebrates his first goal for Austria (GEORG HOCHMUTH/APA/AFP via Getty Images)
Almost 40,000 people sang his name, giving him goosebumps. “Every Austrian footballer who starts playing football wishes for this at some point,” said Entrup, who took the match ball home complete with signatures from every player in the squad.
He had not even known how to celebrate his goal. “I didn’t know what to do with the emotions. In the end I was a little speechless.”
Rangnick said of Entrup’s fall and rise: “He had a very difficult time when he came to Rapid, which meant the future of his career was at stake. I find it remarkable how he mastered this situation. He’s a good guy, a really good boy.”
Entrup ended the campaign with 12 goals — form that was good enough to secure his place on the plane to Germany — and almost moved to German Bundesliga new boys Holstein Kiel but a €1.5million (£1.3m) deal fell through in January.
The striker hasn’t yet played in Germany, with Rangnick preferring Marko Arnautovic, Michael Gregoritsch and Andreas Weimann, but just being at the Euros — for a player once told to go to hell — is a hell of a story.
(Top image: Entrup with his team-mates in the win over the Netherlands. Andreas Gora/picture alliance via Getty Images)
