Wanted: Successful Coaches -- Soccer Men Need Not Apply
February 4, 2006
Bernhard Peters is by no means a household name in German sports publications. Unless field hockey is your favorite sport, you won't be familiar with the German men's national coach in the sport.
Now, Peters' name has been thrown into the ring to assume a top-level post within German Soccer Association (DFB). As technical director, he would assume control and coordinate player development for the DFB. German national soccer coach Jürgen Klinsmann and his managerial sidekick Oliver Bierhoff are the men behind the idea which doesn't sit well with the DFB bosses.
Employing a director with absolutely no soccer credentials has been met with broad criticism from soccer functionaries.
"I personally believe that it will be a problem to put somebody in this post who does not come from soccer," DFB co-president Gerhard Meyer-Vorfelder told kicker magazine.
World Cup winner with West Germany in 1974, Berti Vogts, does not see how Peters can help.
"I think hockey is a different sport to soccer. You cannot compare the two and I can not believe the idea," Vogts, who coached Germany to the Euro 96 title, told kicker.
"Germany have been sleeping"
When Klinsmann and Bierhoff made their proposal to hire Peters, they knew they would be leaning quite far out the window. Klinsmann's ideas, for example his use of an American fitness trainer to get the most physically out of his players, have not exactly been embrace wholeheartedly by a German soccer world that critics say have fallen behind the times.
Klinsmann himself feels there are some gaping deficits in German soccer. Something that can hardly be disputed after the national team disastrously crashed out of Euro 2004. A little help from Peters, who led the German field hockey to a World Cup title in 2002, may help close the gap.
"Bernhard Peters is the man who can help us progress," said Klinsmann. "It would do soccer some good to open up. In the last 10 or 15 years we have been sleeping in Germany."
The second DFB co-president Theo Zwanziger, who met Peters together with Klinsmann and assistant coach Joachim Löw, has not shot down the idea completely but has reservations about placing a man who doesn't know the ins and outs of soccer in such a key job.
Power play in DFB
Soccer circles in Germany believe there is more than meets the eye to the unorthodox choice of Peters. Klinsmann has yet to extend his contract as national coach for the time after when the World Cup ends. When he signed as team head in August 2004, he in no uncertain terms said he wanted to turn things over in the DFB. Desperate at that time to find anybody who would take on the job after Euro 2004, the soccer association succumbed to his demands.
And the dignitaries have gotten more than they expected from Klinsmann, Löw and co. The coach's long absences in his second home California have caused headaches for the DFB and the Bundesliga teams. Club managers have bemoaned the strenuous fitness tests Klinsmann has had the national players go through.
The good, and finally exciting, performance at the Confederations Cup last year confirmed his philosophy. Yet losses to Turkey and Slovakia and some poor play against the Netherlands and China in the autumn have put Klinsmann on the hot seat. He wants to see his ideas come to fruition and the Peters move is the next step.
On February 8, the DFB board will be convening a special meeting in Franfkurt to make a decision. Should the 14-man board indeed bend to Klinsmann's will and offer Peters the job, the sunny-boy of German soccer would have won a big battle.
Should Meyer-Vorfelder and the other doubting Thomases have their way and appoint a second candidate -- most are speculating Matthias Sammer, a soccer man through and through, would get the nod -- it could well mean the end of the Klinsmann era when the final whistle blows at the World Cup final on July 9.