Soccer Star's Crippling Love of Nutella May Have Gotten Him Fired

What's more embarrassing? Being outed for your over-the-top gambling, your extreme carelessness, or your obsession with Nutella? Soccer player Max Kruse, a striker on the German team VfL Wolfsburg, might say that the admission of his love for the chocolate-hazelnut spread ranks highest on the mortification scale. He should know—he's been linked to all three behaviors of late.

Kruse's problems all started last fall with an evening at the World Series Poker Tournament in Berlin. Initially, things were looking good: Kruse won an amazing €75,000 (about $84,000) at the poker table. Then—yes, this really happened—he left the entire amount in a taxi cab. He notified the police, but the money was never found.

Lady Luck, you are such a cruel mistress.

Things only got worse for Kruse from there. On the night of his 28th birthday this month, Kruse went to a Berlin nightclub and was photographed by a woman using her cell phone. Kruse evidently did not want those photos to be released—like, at all—so he grabbed the phone right out of the woman's hands. She wasn't pleased. Kruse apologized, but VfL Wolfsburg fined him €25,000 (about $28,000) for his public misbehavior.

Kruse shouldn't have been so eager to grab that phone. He was, after all, recently photographed in green overalls, constructing a chicken coop as part of Wolfsburg's community service program. That photo has been unceremoniously splashed across the pages of the German press—and not in an attempt to burnish Kruse's reputation as a footballer stud.

But while Kruse's partying ways have obviously cost him a lot of money and caused a fair bit of embarrassment, it's his snack habits that may be taking the proverbial cake.

It has just been announced by Wolfsburg director Klaus Allofs that Kruse has a snacking problem centering on a Nutella addiction. Allofs said he had to have a talk with Kruse at winter training camp last week; in Allofs' words, "The aim is to support our players to deliver optimum performance. Max needs to correct a few things." According to the BBC, Bild reports that Kruse was told to kick his Nutella habit. In the meantime, Kruse has been dropped from the German national team's roster for two matches thanks to the embarrassing confluence of problems that have plagued him of late.

"We need players who are focused on football," said Germany team manager Joachim Low.

That's evidently soccer code for, "Eat less Nutella, dude."