Capital chaos

Michael Skibbe, around the time he took over as coach of Hertha Berlin, told the press it was an easy decision to come back to Germany after just a six-month stint at Turkish side Eskisehirspor.

He spoke of the Eskisehir club's money troubles, its meddlesome owner, its disorganized management. The former Leverkusen and Eintracht Frankfurt coach seemed happy to let Hertha buy him out of his contract in Turkey - after all, Hertha Sporting Director Michael Preetz had offered him a two-and-a-half year deal.

Skibbe lasted less than two months in Berlin before he got fired on Sunday morning.

It's the sort of tale that has begun to sound familiar at Hertha. Less than three years ago the club came within a few games of winning the Bundesliga title. Since then, it has experienced more than its share of chaos.

Preetz took over as Hertha's sporting director in the summer of 2009, and in that time he has fired four coaches. Three of them in mid-season, amid varying degrees of personal conflict, and a fourth, amicably, in the offseason - once he'd gotten the club relegated.

Scratching and shaking of heads

Sports reporters feasted as the story unfolded on Sunday, taking on aspects of a soap opera. Around 200 fans had showed up to morning training to confront the players for rolling over in a 5-0 loss at Stuttgart, which in itself was worthy of television coverage. It was amid this atmosphere of conflict that everyone learned that Skibbe had been sacked.

Later, Michael Preetz looked shell-shocked when he faced the press in the afternoon, owning up to a “mistake” in hiring Skibbe in the first place.

Der Spiegel magazine drew negative comparisons between the Berlin club's hasty firing of Skibbe to Hanover 96's sticking with Mirko Slomka in 2010. Slomka lost his first six league matches before steering Hanover first to safety, and then European qualification the next year. 

The Berlin-based Tagesspiegel broadsheet, meanwhile, looked at the club's serial mismanagement and lamented that Hertha had taken so little onboard of what is good about Berlin - nothing of what makes the city “open, inviting, full of fantasy and experimentation,” and certainly none of “what is decisive in sport - success.”

Perhaps the most telling reaction came from Mönchengladbach, where the Borussia coach was asked about the firing in a routine TV appearance after Sunday training.

“Things can move very fast,” said foals' Coach Lucien Favre. “I've always said it - German football lacks continuity, lacks a concept.”

Favre knows of what he speaks. His first post in the Bundesliga was at Hertha; he was the victim in Michael Preetz's first axe-ing.

It's not hard to read the statement as an indictment of Hertha, or at least a reminder that the club's self-inflicted troubles are all too common, at least among a certain type of club.

Magnificent delusions

Among Lukas Podolski's main criticisms of his club FC Cologne in a now-infamous interview with the Bild am Sonntag was its “lack of continuity.” Since returning to his boyhood club in 2009, Podolski has played for no less than five coaches.

And it's also not surprising that the other club to have fired their coach under questionable circumstances this week was Hoffenheim.

Holger Stanislawski, the club's third sacked coach in a little over a year, was given his walking papers just weeks after hearing from his bosses that he was “an excellent coach” and one who they hoped “would be our coach in eight years' time.”

What all three clubs share is a tendency to overestimate themselves. That can be down to distant, illustrious history (Cologne), an impatient tycoon accustomed to getting results from his mountain of cash (Hoffenheim), or the simple vanity the comes from doing business in Germany's only world-class city, Berlin. Whatever the case, each regularly sets goals it can't reach, to more or less disastrous results.

It's not a malady unique to these clubs - witness Hamburg, or past versions of Schalke - and it's not a cycle that can't be broken. Dortmund nearly went broke from its particluar brand of hubris, and Gladbach, another club prone to destructive pipe dreaming, now looks well on its way to a bright, steady future.

It took some care on the transfer market, some luck to get a good crop of youngsters coming through together, and a set of fans that had all but made their peace with settling for fighting relegation. But above all, it takes continuity, and a concept.

Just like Favre said. Perhaps, two years after firing him, Preetz will listen.

Author: Matt Hermann
Editor: Richard Connor