Jurgen Klinsmann hails from Swabia, the conservative south-west of Germany. But the 55-year-old took to his job at Hertha Berlin in the radical manner of fellow Californian Mark Zuckerberg. Move fast and break things.
It’s the way he’s always operated. If there are people within a federation or a club that he doesn’t like or rate, they’re gone. Not tomorrow. Today.
After his appointment at Hertha ten weeks ago, his first prominent victim was goalkeeping coach Zsolt Petry. The 53-year-old was instantly replaced by German national team goalkeeping coach Andreas Kopke, on an interim basis. That decision marked an inauspicious start to Klinsmann’s 76-day tenure before it had even begun: it reeked of nepotism and personal revenge.
Two years ago, Petry had criticised Klinsmann’s son, Jonathan, a budding goalkeeper at Hertha for lacking charisma. Klinsmann junior, 22, has since moved on to play for St Gallen in Switzerland last summer but his father wanted to bring him back.
As Bild revealed, he raised the issue during failed negotiations for an extended coaching contract beyond the summer. The club president Werner Gegenbauer refused.
Kopke’s son Pascal, incidentally, also plays for Hertha. Klinsmann handed the 24-year-old, a striker on the fringes of the first team, his first two starts for the seniors last week. Hertha lost both games, in the cup away to Schalke and at home to Mainz.
The former Bayern Munich and Germany manager, it should be said, was hardly the first man in football to look after his own. Previous Hertha coaches Pal Dardai and Ante Covic, too, had their sons playing for the club.
The Zolt-JK-junior-affair was indicative of Klinsmann’s sheer bloody-mindedness but a mere sideshow in comparison of the bigger conflict that lay at the heart of his abrupt departure on Tuesday morning.
Backed by London-based investor Lars Windhorst, who bought just under half the shares of the club’s subsidiary company that runs the football operations for €224 million last year, Klinsmann wanted to turn the mid-sized and rather dull Hertha into a glitzy European superpower as quickly as possible.
“Klinsmann doesn’t do any half measures, he’s travelling at a murderous pace and expects everyone to follow suit,” an official from one of Germany’s leading clubs tells The Athletic. “At a club like Hertha, where those in office have been there for years and are fairly comfortable with the status quo, it was all bound to blow up.”
Gegenbauer and general manager Michael Preetz pleaded patience, gradual progress and cooperation. In effort to ward off relegation, Klinsmann was allowed to spend €77 million on four new players in January, more than any manager in Europe. But the two parties never saw eye to eye about the best way of rendering Hertha, the self-styled “Old Dame”, sexy and successful.
Preetz, a former Hertha striker turned official who’s been in the job since 2009, even admitted to acting like “a handbrake” a few weeks ago. The 52-year-old was suspicious of the pace of change and of the amount of money invested into the squad.
Transfer fees and wages for the new quartet — Krzysztof Piatek (AC Milan), Lucas Tousart (loaned back to Lyon until June), Matheus Cunha (RB Leipzig), Santiago Ascacibar (VfB Stuttgart) — swallowed up a significant portion of the Windhorst funds in one go.
Klinsmann himself revealed that he wanted more, however. Everything, in fact: the power to control all aspects of first team affairs without internal oversight, with a commensurate salary that Hertha officials privately described as “astronomical”. The club rebuffed him.
Klinsmann denied that money was a factor for his abrupt departure on Tuesday morning in a Facebook video the next evening.“We couldn’t agree on the division of responsibilities,” he said. “I’m not used to general managers sitting on the bench, talking to referees and players. I’m used to the English model, where managers only report to the owner. I was very annoyed by that.”
It’s hard to know whether the mid 90s Spurs striker truly believes that the Premier League is still the domain of autocratic rulers in the Ferguson-Wenger mould or why he thought that Preetz and Gegenbauer would simply move aside for his one-man-show, in a break with protocol in the Bundesliga.
Perhaps he simply overplayed his rather weak hand. Either way, he had no realistic chance of being anointed as the club’s full-time potentate while Hertha were still in the relegation battle and playing a stodgy, ultra-defensive game that made even well-disposed spectators’ eyes bleed.
Things could have conceivably changed if he had saved Hertha and brought about a marked improvement in the performances but there was also the danger, conversely, that Preetz would have fired him after a defeat against bottom-side Paderborn this Saturday.
Klinsmann simply walked out without any prior notice on Tuesday, put up a Facebook post soaked in crocodile tears (“It was an incredibly exciting time for me, with many new interesting insights. The club and the city have grown on me even more”) before anyone had a chance to react and left the whole club in a ditch, six points off the relegation play-off spot.
His exit was widely castigated as shameful and disrespectful by the German media, including journalists who had supported him steadfastly for decades.
Klinsmann had initially mooted the possibility of returning to his erstwhile role as an advisory board member on behalf Windhorst in a few weeks but by Wednesday afternoon, it was obvious that he had lost the financier’s support.
Klinsmann apologised to him and to supporters for the manner of his resignation and sheepishly blamed his impulsive nature. Windhorst’s verdict was damning, still.
“The way he left was unacceptable,” he said at a joint press conference with Gegenbauer and Preetz on Thursday morning. “I guess he blew a fuse. That can happen if you’re an adolescent but it shouldn’t happen in business, when serious agreements between adults are in place.”
Klinsmann’s departure, Windhorst added, had cost Hertha a sponsor. Then Preetz cooly twisted the knife. “There was a disagreement about the role of the head coach and its responsibilities,” he confirmed. “But there was never any talk about me sitting on the bench being a problem. I’m used to people addressing conflicts, talking them over and attempting to find a solution. You can’t do that by turning around and running away.”
There is no coming back for the Swabian from that; not in Germany, in any case. His former assistant Alexander Nouri will take over, for the time being.
The situation in the capital is bound to remain volatile, however, as the side’s league position and Windhorst’s “big city club” aspirations, are unlikely to align any time soon. It thus remains to be seen whether he’ll prove a calm and largely passive investor for “10 or 20 years,” as he promised on Thursday, or fall head over heels for the next Klinsmann to come along and whisper sweet promises of Champions League football into his ear.
The real battle for the heart of Hertha, one suspects, is yet to begin.
God is good
