Ballack’s move to Bayer Leverkusen appears to have hit a sour spot after Ballack’s agent, Michael Becker, labelled the German national team ‘a bunch of gays.’

Becker’s comments were taken from an interview with Der Spiegel magazine in Germany. The writer of the article, Aleksandar Osang, also wrote that everyone in Germany was already aware of the homophobic remarks and rumours surrounding Die Mannschaft, and Becker was just the first to say anything about it publicly.

Becker allegedly said that homosexuality is what has caused the German national team to play such pleasant football, and that if the German national team were not all ‘a bunch of gays,’ they would have been determined enough to beat Spain.

Bayer Leverkusen distanced themselves from the comments, as one would expect them to do after having statements like these made by a source so close to the club.

Michael Ballack has everything to prove to the German public in a football sense, and now in a humanitarian sense too. While the comments are not his, and are in no way his opinion, having an agent who is so directly and publicly homophobic and offensive is quite outrageous.

Ballack will be wonderful to watch as he takes the field in the Bundesliga once again, but the pressure will be on him to turn things around and force his way back into Joachim Loew’s thinking.