Hansi Flick remains Germany coach only by default as they continue to flounder
A few days ago, the German Football Association (DFB) had to make a delicate admission: they had miscounted their number of international games from 2018 to 2020.
Instead of the 40 matches UEFA was contracted to market for them, the DFB declared they had actually played 42 times, which reduced their tax burden. Whether that was an innocent mistake is currently being investigated by the relevant authorities, but it is certainly a huge embarrassment — and sadly fitting for a rudderless organisation that has been steeped in accounting scandals and sporting failures in recent years.
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The way things are going, Hansi Flick’s tenure as German men’s national team coach could well go down as one of the DFB’s many blunders as well.
Tuesday’s pitiful 2-0 defeat by Colombia in Gelsenkirchen, their third winless friendly in just over a week, prolonged a run of awful results stretching back to March of last year. Flick has won only four of his 16 games in that time: against Italy (5-2 in the Nations League), Oman (1-0 in a friendly), Costa Rica (4-2 at the World Cup) and Peru (2-0 in a friendly).
The man who was supposed to take Germany back to the top after succeeding 2014 World Cup winner Joachim Low just over three years ago has instead almost reached rock bottom a year before a European Championship on home soil. Only Erich Ribbeck, whose time at the helm coincided with German football’s darkest times (1998-2000; 10 wins, eight losses, six draws), has a worse overall record as national-team manager.
Germany’s players digest their latest defeat to Colombia (Photo: Federico Gambarini/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Flick, 58, professed himself “disappointed” after their latest setback, freely admitting that his experiments had been “pants”.
Perhaps most depressingly, many had seen it coming.
Instead of honing his preferred 4-2-3-1 system with the best players at his disposal in this month’s matches, Flick opted to try out a back-three formation that undermined Germany’s remaining strengths.
The resulting confusion was sadly reminiscent of Low’s ‘Jazz Odyssey’ days at the previous European Championship in 2021, when the team did their best to cope with many of the manager’s half-baked ideas but ultimately could not make sense of the nonsensical.
Actually, it’s even worse now.
Still low on confidence after their World Cup debacle, Germany craved clarity, continuity and simplicity. Instead, Flick needlessly added to the prevailing sense of uncertainty and chaos, shuffling his line-ups without much rhyme and reason and adopting a formation his players never believed in.
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Manchester City’s metronomic playmaker Ilkay Gundogan was deployed in a strange inside-left attacking role next to Leroy Sane. Emre Can, a holding midfielder for Borussia Dortmund, was at the centre of a three-man back line, while Kai Havertz was once again lost as a false nine with nobody ahead of him to pass the ball to, all while centre-forward Niclas Fullkrug spent the first hour against Colombia on the bench.
Midfielder Can played in the middle of a back three (Photo: Alex Grimm/Getty Images)
Most of the half-decent moments in the flattering draw with Ukraine (3-3) in Bremen, the 1-0 defeat to Poland in Warsaw and the loss to Colombia came when Flick temporarily reverted to a back four. But these three games, advertised as a chance to develop a Plan B for next year’s tournament, only amplified fears Germany are heading for a fourth consecutive disaster in a major finals (They failed to get out of the group at the past two World Cups, either side of a round of 16 exit at Euro 2020). “Help! Flick is ruining our Euros,” tabloid Bild exclaimed.
Sporting director Rudi Voller tried to shift the blame, insisting that Flick was “a poor sod” for having to work “with these players”. Too many of them lack the requisite quality to play for the national team, the 1990 World Cup winner said, and he predicted that some of them “won’t be seen” when the call-ups are made for the next games in September.
It was a curious defence in light of Flick’s decision to try out a couple of new faces, such as 21-year-old AC Milan defender Malick Thiaw, as well the coach’s plea to the media a few days ago to temper their criticism of the players. Sporting directors do often play the role of bad cop in Germany but Voller’s outburst didn’t feel part of a joined-up communication strategy, it was more like an act of desperation.
Thiaw made his debut in the loss to Poland last week (Photo: Alex Grimm/Getty Images)
Now, with the Euros kicking off on June 14 next year, time is running out.
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Flick can but hope that a return to form of the squad’s Bayern contingent under Thomas Tuchel next season will lift the side before early September friendlies at home to Japan and France. He will, surely, ditch an ill-advised formation that players openly questioned this week. “The back three didn’t work,” Can said after the Colombia game. “If I was in charge, I would go back to the back four. We’re more comfortable that way.”
The coach is generally liked in the dressing room, just as Low was until the end. But, like his predecessor, he is also in danger of losing his team’s trust in his methods.
The same is true of his bosses at the DFB. Flick was allowed to continue after last winter’s World Cup because bosses believed that group-stage exit, following a shock 2-1 opening loss to Japan in a game they had led after 74 minutes, was an unlucky accident for a proven winner. That perception is waning with every poor subsequent performance. Increasingly, it looks as if 2020’s treble with Bayern, after being promoted from an assistant role when Niko Kovac was fired in the November of that season, could have been a blip in an otherwise undistinguished coaching career.
Flick will continue in the role through to September, as DFB president Bernd Neuendorf has confirmed. But he will be Germany coach by default — there is nobody else to take over at short notice. Even that won’t save him if things continue to unravel in three months’ time, though. Two more defeats will make his position simply untenable.
There is no contingency plan for that in place yet, but one obvious name is bound to come up.
As everyone at the German FA’s Frankfurt headquarters knows, it is DFB vice-president Hans-Joachim Watzke’s dream to install Jurgen Klopp — who he worked with for seven seasons at Borussia Dortmund — sooner rather than later.
If Dortmund chief executive Watzke’s secret master plan is to sit back and watch Flick fail so badly the Liverpool manager might feel it is his patriotic duty to step in to try to rescue Germany from another tournament humiliation, this one on their own turf, he is right on course.
(Top photo: Federico Gambarini/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Germany coach Flick on thin ice after shock loss to Colombia
BERLIN, June 21 (Reuters) – Germany coach Hansi Flick had started his tenure in 2021 with an eight-game winning run and a promise to fans to get the four-time world champions back on the right track.
After Tuesday’s 2-0 shock home loss to Colombia, however, Flick looks to have used up almost all of that early credit, with the Germans, hosts of Euro 2024, having lost to Poland and drawn 3-3 against Ukraine in their three internationals this month.
“Is he the right man for the job?,” asked several German media in their online polls on Wednesday.
“A year before the Euro it looks like the coach and his team have lost all orientation,” Kicker football magazine wrote in a comment.
Germany, who have less than a year to build a battle-hardened team for the continental tournament and shore up enthusiasm in the country, had needed two late goals to draw with Ukraine before Friday’s 1-0 loss in Warsaw.
They delivered an even worse performance against Colombia in Gelsenkirchen with Flick’s players lacking urgency in their game and any punch up front.
Germany have won just one of their last five matches since their shock World Cup group stage exit in December. They have also won only three of their last 11.
When Flick took over two years ago Germany had just suffered a last 16 exit at the Euro in 2021 following their first World Cup first stage exit in more than 80 years in 2018.
Flick looked to be the perfect man for the job after his six-trophy run with Bayern Munich in 2020 and his years-long work with his Germany predecessor Joachim Loew as his assistant coach which was capped by the 2014 World Cup triumph in Brazil.
But now his back is against the wall despite his assurances that the team will be completely different in their next set of internationals in September.
“We will see a different team,” Flick said. “We will stabilise the team and we will fine-tune it.
“We are positive for September because we are convinced we have a good team and good players. “
Germany host Japan on Sept. 9 before entertaining France three days later. They then travel to North America to face the United States on Oct. 14.
German fans, however, are quickly running out of patience having failed to see any clear signs of any recovery in recent months.
“Flick’s announcement that things ‘will be different in September’ now only sounds like a morale-boosting slogan,” Kicker said.
The one-year countdown for the Euros has started as has the countdown for Flick to start delivering by September.
Reporting by Karolos Grohmann
Editing by Christian Radnedge
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
90,000 things that can go wrong Live Berlin open line The editors are not working on the materials for this section. They are created, designed and published by users.
When asked what I do in Germany, I answer that I am a trainer, moderator, facilitator, coach and mediator. After that, I have to answer five questions already.
This is what my articles will be about here in the Open Line: what are the above professions in Germany and under what conditions can one successfully engage in them.
Here, for example, is a coach. In Germany, this is primarily a person from the world of fitness and sports. And besides, he is a specialist in adult education. At the same time, 99 percent of coaches in the field of sales, management, communications, leadership – all those who are called business coaches in the post-Soviet space – work in Germany as freelancers. They register on special online exchanges, promote themselves on the Internet, do not shy away from social networks (although ordinary Germans are rather suspicious and wary of social networks). Even XING has a special section for them!
A freiberuflich (self-employed) coach starts from 70 euros per hour, and he pays his own insurance and, of course, pays taxes.
Trainings are held in a corporate format or on the basis of training organizations, the so-called Bildungsträger. With the corporate format, everything is almost the same as in the post-Soviet space: an organization or enterprise hires a trainer on a fee basis to train its staff. The topics are very diverse – from sales to managing your health.
Training organizations offer trainings for mixed groups. At the same time, those interested in learning rarely pay for their own education. Most often, the expenses are taken over by Jobcenter or Agentur für Arbeit – public employment services. But for this, employees of these structures need to be convinced that you need this training in order to find a new job. In the corresponding article, I will tell you how I did it.
Sometimes the cost of training in external organizations is taken over by the employer. This happens within the framework of the social package. For example, employees of Deutsche Bahn receive 1,000 euros a year with the right to spend it on a course they like, say, intuitive painting or Spanish. The course can be taken on a weekend or during a special study holiday – Bildungsurlaub.
A Russian-speaking business coach has nothing to gain here. Firstly, the coach receives orders, primarily using connections and relying on his reputation. All this has been accumulated over the years.
Secondly, the trainer works with the group. Russian-speaking groups abroad are members of some emigre societies or organizations, and they do not need business training. The trainings that Russian-speaking trainers offer for their own are cash flow games, retreats for the spouses of blue card holders, yoga for pregnant women and other popular crap.
However, there is a lot of such trash in German. After all, the profession of a coach in Germany is not protected by law, and anyone can call themselves a coach. I experienced several such trainings when I took free courses for immigrant women, and later participated in another free program for the unemployed. Just like in the country of origin, long monologues are often called trainings, only not with slides, but with posters on a flipchart. Usually dumping unfortunate trainers serve various public organizations.
You can only find a good order or job if you have a trainer diploma, which is obtained at trainings for trainers. I also went through such training, and I will write about it later in an article about vocational education.
A permanent job as a trainer can be found primarily by those who teach German to visitors. Germany actively attracts emigrants, in Berlin there are up to 20 percent of them, so the profession of a language trainer is very popular, although not very profitable. I had a chance to work as a trainer at women’s integration courses for 20 euros per hour. At six hours a day, that’s pretty good. By the way, language trainers are often called associate professors.
But what kind of trainers are completely absent in our penates – these are the so-called Ausbilder, specialists who teach specific professions: drive locomotives, bake bread, write computer programs, take care of the elderly . .. Vacancies for such trainers are constantly posted by German railways, insurance companies, large enterprises like Siemens, Volkswagen or Hyatt. As well as vocational schools, which are apparently invisible in Germany! ..
To find a permanent job as a coach in Germany, you must, first of all, master a subject in demand. Secondly, in German at a level not lower than C1. The third is to pass a special exam for the right to teach adults or work with this same Ausbilder: AEVO.
The AEVO exam is not that difficult, but boring. It consists of two parts. In the practical part, you need to conduct a 15-minute training in your specialty. For example, I “trained” one of the members of the commission on how to build the beginning of a presentation for clients. The theoretical part consists of 75 questions on teaching methods and laws in the field of vocational education of young people. Preparing for this exam alone is quite realistic. You can buy books, a smartphone app, and learning cards. And you can sign up for two-week courses, which I did. If you are lucky with the trainer, then he/she will also tell you how to prepare documentation for the exam, which is important.
And what’s interesting: the AEVO exam is the only opportunity to work as a teacher for those whose pedagogical diploma is not confirmed in Germany. For example, I have a Ukrainian diploma “chemist, teacher of chemistry.” My diploma is confirmed in chemistry, but not in teaching, that is, I could work as a chemist, but not as a chemistry teacher. But after passing the AEVO exam, I am allowed not only to teach chemistry to adults, but also to work at school as a Quereinsteiger, that is, to take a teaching position subject to immediate admission to the university in order to finish my studies and meet German standards. But I went the other way, which I will tell about next time.
And the last paragraph for those who want to work in Germany as a business coach. Be prepared for the fact that you will be required to have a thorough psychological preparation and knowledge of classical theories and methods of working with groups. Business training grew out of psychotherapy, and in Germany this connection has not yet broken up. Therefore, highly professional coaches pay a lot of attention to group dynamics and strictly observe the ratio of theory and practice in favor of the latter. They are not in a hurry: I have never met offers for training shorter than five days.
Iryna Kyrychenko
Born in Ukraine and since 2017 lives in Germany. In Ukraine, she worked as a teacher, psychologist, business coach and personnel development specialist in large companies, a trainer in innovative educational technologies at the National Center “Small Academy of Sciences of Ukraine”.
In Germany, he continues to work in the field of adult education: he leads a project for integration into the labor market in a private vocational school. In parallel, she conducts mediations for couples, self-confidence trainings. He heads the club of Russian-speaking psychologists, trainers, coaches and consultants in Berlin.
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