V16 months ago the water into which Ole Werner was thrown seemed very cold. So far as a coach only at home in Schleswig-Holstein’s youth football and responsible for the second Holstein Kiel team for five years, the now 32-year-old football teacher took over the professional team from André Schubert. Schubert and KSV Holstein, that didn’t work at all. Holstein was sixteenth.
The clever development work of the past few years seemed to be in danger. Nevertheless, some outside observers wondered whether the largely unknown man would be the right one for Kiel’s ambitions. With its traditionally good financial opportunities, Holstein is not a lightweight in the Second Bundesliga. Internally, the powerful supervisory board around the wealthy Kiel entrepreneurs Gerd Lütje and Hermann Langness were quickly convinced of the choice of former sports director Fabian Wohlgemuth – also because the donors like it so much that a real Kieler was now sitting in the coaching bench.
#When he made up for the cup game in the second round against FC Bayern Munich this Wednesday (8.45 p.m. in the FAZ live ticker for the DFB Cup, on ARD and on Sky), Ole Werner is now looking after a stable team that is looking to advance to the Bundesliga trusts – currently it is third place for the KSV with the best defense of the football lower house. At the turn of the year, the compact team even went as the leader of the table.
In the club as with the players, Werner was held in high esteem from day one: 15 years in the club, a “Kieler Jung” who comes from nearby Preetz, has played for some district clubs and has completed his entire coaching career at KSV – more Stable smell does not work. In addition, a calm demeanor and a clear North German idiom: Ole Werner is anything but a “Schnacker”, remains calm even before the big cup appearance against the Champions League winner FC Bayern: “This game is nothing to other processes and leads to completely different topics of conversation than what we usually have. “
First division training center
Something like that fits very well with Holstein Kiel, an association that enjoys its calm media environment and keeps away from excessive expectations. “We are developing into a seasoned second division representative,” says Werner, four years after being promoted. The fact that things are going so well this season doesn’t seem so surprising to him: “We didn’t have any major upheaval in the summer, we have a well-rehearsed axis and we have strengthened ourselves appropriately.”
In addition, in the district of Projensdorf there is a first-division training center, a good substructure with many talents from the north and a converted stadium that looks more like professional football with the new grandstand than before – the renovation of the venerable arena should be finished in 2024. Money from the professional business went into the modernization of the training center again this time. KSV Holstein has been planning long-term for years, and that means sometimes investing in stones, not legs.
For Ole Werner, the not entirely unexpected path to becoming a candidate for promotion could not be mastered without difficulties. While the business was running, he completed the soccer teacher course, had to grapple with the consequences of the pandemic and had a bereavement in the family. Werner paused for ten days at the end of the past season before returning to the bench for the last home game against Nuremberg in June 2020.
Werner relies on the defensive
While Holstein has stood for creative offensive football in the past three seasons, Werner focuses on the defensive. He worked intensively on the defense concepts of José Mourinho at Tottenham and Diego Simeone at Atlético. It was less about group tactics and more about what each of his defensive players can do better. It seems to have worked – the Kiel team only had to accept 14 goals around defense chief Lukas Wahl. Wahl is seen by many as a professional with the smartest opening of the second division. Van den Bergh, Meffert, Mühling and striker Janni Serra have also been with us for a long time, like Wahl. The Bremen returnee Fin Bartels and the courted South Korean Jae-Sung Lee give Werner’s team the necessary joy in playing.
Since third place in the 2017/18 season, Holstein has repeatedly had to let coaches and players go, who then went to bigger clubs like Markus Anfang, Tim Walter or Dominick Drexler, Marvin Ducksch and David Kinsombi. This trend seems to have stopped. Kiel is considered a good address in terms of salary prospects and also for the football that is played here.
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