Marcelo Pletsch – The Brazilian Defensive Wall: Marcelo Pletsch played for Gladbach from 1999 to 2005. Toward the end of the 2004/05 season he was suspended for comments deemed damaging to the club. He became notorious for a brutal tackle on Werder’s Markus Daun in 2003, which kept Daun out for more than six months and from which he never truly recovered. After retirement, Pletsch returned to Brazil, where he ran a pig farm and a trucking business.\n\nIn November 2015, police stopped him in Paraná and found more than 793 kilograms of marijuana in his truck.
He was sentenced to nine years and two months in prison, at least three and a half of them in a six-man cell. He has continued to protest his innocence.