Et was important to him to receive every single player personally and to exchange a few words. Hans-Dieter “Hansi” Flick had time for that on Sunday. Except for the arrival of the German national team, nothing was on the program. That only changed on Monday, when the new national coach gave his first address to the entire team in the morning at the Waldhotel in Stuttgart, before he asked for the first training session with 16 professionals in the afternoon, the remaining ten players stayed in the hotel to regenerate.
Mads Buttgereit was there too. The 36-year-old is next to assistant coach Danny Röhl (32) and goalkeeping coach Andreas Kronenberg (46) one of the newcomers to Flick’s coaching staff. He was explicitly hired as a coach for standards. He was looking forward to his work, said Buttgereit. From experience he knows how open and receptive players are to innovations and would try to include every small percentage that is available as additional information in their daily work.
Buttgereit is the son of a Dane and a German. He speaks perfect German and lived in Flensburg for some time. From 2015 to 2016 Buttgereit was assistant coach for the youth teams of the Danish club FC Midtjylland. The club has been a model club in terms of innovation for several years. The Danish champions’ football from 2015 and 2018 is closely linked to statistics – and to technical aids to calculate things like tactics or transfers. A trademark of Midtjylland, however, are standards that Buttgereit took care of for the professional team from 2017 to 2019 before he switched to the Danish U18. At the EM in the summer he was part of the coaching staff of Denmark’s senior team, which surprisingly made it to the semi-finals.
Only one free kick goal at the EM
The Danes were responsible for the only directly converted free kick in the pan-European tournament – Mikkel Damsgaard had perfectly circled the ball with the inside over the wall into the goal in the semifinals against England (1: 2). “It would not be about training something spectacular,” said Buttgereit on Monday, but much more about showing how you can create the possibility “that the opposing goalkeeper can no longer react”.
The Dane Mikkel Damsgaard (No. 14) scored the only free-kick goal in the 2021 European Championship. He scored in the semifinals against England
Those: pa / dmg media Lic / Kevin Quigley
The last European Championship served as the best example of how important it is to train standards. Because the participating teams rarely scored a goal after set pieces. The proportion increased slightly from matchday to matchday, but was still rather low – only 34 of the 142 goals were scored after the balls were inactive, which corresponds to 24 percent. At the World Cup in Russia, where there was a lack of playful moments, this rate was more than 40 percent – in the 2020/21 Bundesliga season 25 percent of goals were scored according to standards.
The 2014 World Cup success of the German national team showed how important offensive standard situations can be. The DFB-Elf scored four goals in the entire tournament after a dormant ball. Including the decisive 1-0 through Mats Hummels in the quarter-finals against France. She then revealed major problems, especially after the 2018 World Cup debacle in Russia. After this tournament, only three out of 60 goals were scored according to set pieces in the games up to the 2021 European Championship – two of them by corners, out of a total of 167. At the European Championship, for example, the German team had a total of 17 corners in the games against France, Portugal, Hungary and England – none of them resulted in a goal. Against Portugal, however, to a goal, the 0: 1, because the protection backwards had not been correct. This should also be practiced under Buttgereit in the future.
“Mads will show new ways”
At the EM you saw that standards “are a topic that is very important”, Flick explained at his presentation in Frankfurt in mid-August: “That’s why we now have Mads with us. He will show new ways of scoring goals in set pieces. ”That Flick in Buttgereit,“ who I already had on the slip when I was with Bayern ”, now relies on an assistant who is exclusively concerned with a specific training work Taking care of the topic, i.e. the balls at rest in corners and free kicks, is an improvement on the work of its predecessor. However, Flick is not the first coach to rely on specialists.
Jürgen Klopp, for example, has been known for years for bringing experts into his team. Thomas Grönnemark has been working as a throw-in coach for Liverpool FC since 2018. The Dane, who previously worked for FC Midtjylland like Buttgereit, is responsible, among other things, for working with the Klopp players on the throw-in technique or, following video analysis, showing them how the upcoming opponent behaves when throwing in and using this as an opportunity To make the game fast or to create scoring opportunities with it. Buttgereit, who sees video analysis as an important part of his work, acts in a similar way. In doing so, he says, one should not only pay attention to the obvious. You have to recognize nuances, “how the opponent’s players behave with a corner kick or a free kick, where they stand, how they run”. He once told “transfermarkt.de” that the standards of coaches were “neglected” and that he was certain that top teams could become “unbeatable for years” through targeted free kick and corner kick training.
As for his work, Buttgereit also let it be known before the World Cup qualifiers against Liechtenstein on Thursday (8.45 p.m.), Armenia (5.9 Golf helps – the TrackMan. This measures and shows the complete flight of the ball for all strokes; the radar also shows a 3-dimensional flight curve of the ball and all impact moments and departure information.
This is now being used more and more in football – especially with the German national team.
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