You know the vibe. It’s late September, the Bundesliga grind is real, and VfL Wolfsburg is trying to remember what it feels like to be a juggernaut. New coach, new faces, that familiar hangover from watching Bayern lift another Supercup. Then you see it: a blur of orange streaking down the left flank, a cross whipped in with contemptuous precision that finds Alexandra Popp’s forehead. A few games later, it’s a turbo-charged run and a deflected shot for her first goal. Then, in the dying seconds against Köln, she steps up to take a corner while 20,000 people hold their breath. The delivery is perfect. The header is perfect. Three points are snatched from the jaws of a draw.
This isn’t a player finding her feet. This is a player planting a flag. Janou Levels didn’t come to Wolfsburg to settle in; she came to take over.
The She-Wolves’ New Alpha
Let’s be clear about what Wolfsburg did this summer. This wasn’t a gentle refresh. It was a gut job. After years of Bayern’s dominance, the club brought back Stephan Lerch and handed him a mission: rebuild the fortress. And in that rebuild, Janou Levels wasn’t just another brick. She was a cornerstone signing, a statement of intent wrapped in a Dutch international kit.
Ralf Kellermann, the club’s director of women’s football, doesn’t deal in fluff. His assessment of Levels was as sharp as the player’s tackling: “Anyone who sees Janou on the pitch soon realises that she has an excellent mentality.” Translation? She’s got the bite. He didn’t just praise her technique; he highlighted the one thing you can’t coach: a relentless, 100-percent-all-the-time engine that “fits perfectly with the way we want to portray ourselves as VfL Wolfsburg.”
But here’s the thing about a “new challenge,” as Levels called it. You either sink or you start swimming so fast you drag the whole team with you. Through the first crucial matches of the 2025/26 season, Levels has been a human tsunami. One goal, one assist, one game-winning set-piece delivery in her first four league games? That’s not just impact; that’s immediate ownership. She’s started every match, a constant in a backline still figuring itself out, proving that the most important signing of Wolfsburg’s summer wasn’t a gamble—it was a guarantee.
Built for This: The Mentality That Precedes the Player
So where does this edge come from? This isn’t some overnight sensation. Levels’ career is a masterclass in deliberate, gritty development. Think she just showed up? Forget it. This is a player who, at 14, moved to a sports campus, living and breathing football. She didn’t hone her skills in comfortable, predictable matches. Her team played against boys’ teams in the Dutch fourth division. Let that sink in. She learned to survive—and thrive—against “physical superiority, high processing speed, and pressure.” That’s not training; that’s forging steel.
She cut her teeth at PSV, making over a hundred appearances and being part of the team that delivered the club’s first major women’s trophy. And even then, there was a human moment of pure, unvarnished passion: in that cup final, she conceded a penalty because she instinctively raised her hand to appeal for a handball against an opponent. A brain fart? Maybe. But it’s the kind of competitive fire you can’t fake. It’s the same fire that saw her captain Dutch youth teams, a natural leader in the making.
Her two years at Bayer Leverkusen were merely a Bundesliga audition. Her old director, Thomas Eichin, practically admitted it, calling her move to Wolfsburg “understandable” because they develop players for exactly this kind of step up. Levels didn’t just arrive in Germany ready; she arrived prepared.
The Human Glue in a New Machine
But talent and mentality alone aren’t enough. How does a new signing integrate so seamlessly, so quickly? The answer is as simple as the color orange.
Walk into the Wolfsburg dressing room, and Levels is surrounded by home. She’s not a stranger in a strange land; she’s reuniting with her people. She went to school with Lynn Wilms. She came up through the national youth teams with Caitlin Dijkstra and Ella Peddemors—the same Peddemors she assisted with a slick layoff against Bremen. This isn’t a minor detail; it’s everything.
It’s the difference between learning plays and understanding a player’s soul. It’s the shared language, the unspoken cues, the trust that’s already baked in. When midfielder Justine Kielland says the atmosphere is “super” despite all the new faces, it’s because of connections like these. Levels could be quiet, she admits, but with this crew? She’s talking “very happily.” She slid into the heart of the team like she slides into a tackle: decisively and without apology.
The Promise of 100 Percent
So, what are we really looking at? We’re looking at a player who defined her own identity from day one: “I’m a player who always gives 100 percent and I will do that at VfL as well.” How many times do we hear that empty cliché? With Levels, it’s a quantifiable fact. It’s in every lung-busting run, every aggressive challenge (yes, even the one that conceded a penalty against Bremen—that’s the risk that comes with the reward), and every decisive ball into the box.
In a Wolfsburg team navigating an Umbruch—a restructuring—they haven’t just found a solid defender. They’ve found a catalyst. Janou Levels is the embodiment of the new She-Wolf energy: sharp, direct, and playing with a point to prove. The barroom debate isn’t about if she’ll be a success. It’s about how high her ceiling really is. And based on this start? The roof’s the limit.
She told us who she was. Maybe it’s time we started listening.
doragon sports 