BarcelonaThe interwar Europe, times of revolts and visceral changes, was so complicated that the same person could come to have different names. Richard Kohn, a Viennese Jew, was the first man to unite the fate of Barça and Bayern, because he coached the two teams, but with different names. In Barcelona he would be known as Jack Domby, while in Munich he was called Richard Dombi. The first time he arrived in Barcelona, in fact, the press referred to him as “Dombi Littles”, a mistake caused by the nickname he had at home, “the little eminence”, because he was not very tall but he was ready as a hole. His is still a little-known figure, because he was cursed to live in historic days, when Europe was on its way to hell.
Kohn put the seeds, both in Catalonia and in Bavaria, to understand the football philosophy of the two clubs. Being Viennese, he had become one of the best students of the generation of coaches who was perfecting a very modern way of understanding football. He was a privileged student of coaches such as Jimmy Hogan and Hugo Meisl, men who came to cities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire such as Vienna, Budapest and Prague to perfect the best football tactics of the time. Of Kohn, however, much remains to be known. Born in 1888, he is known to have played for various clubs, such as Wiener, and to have become an international with Austria in four games from 1908 to 1912. He was a technical player who fit into that Transdanubian school where the game it was more elegant. These years it would gain the nickname of “Kleine Dombi”, that in local dialect would come to be “small eminence”. A nickname that over the years would become his last name.
But Kohn was also a man of great personality and during a Wiener AC tour of Germany he was one of the leaders in a revolt of players against the board for economic reasons. The revolted players came to create the Wiener AF in response. Kohn was one of those who believed that the sport needed to be professionalized, which is why the Federation left him off the list of those called up to go to the 1912 Olympics. The new club, by the way, was a failure and he ended up leaving. the MTK in Budapest, a club that then had a reputation for being that of the Hungarian Jewish community and where the coach was Jimmy Hogan, who had already worked with him in Vienna. Kohn ended up returning to Wiener AC, where in 1918 it appears he still played a game, although it is unclear what he did during World War I.
Arrival in Barcelona
After the Great War, Kohn began his career as a technician. Some say he traveled to Uruguay to learn, because this small state was already the promised land for football lovers, but there is no evidence. In the early 1920s we find it in Berlin, in the Hertha. And then to the Croatian HSK Građanski, with whom he won the Croatian championship but lost the final of the Yugoslav championship in 1925. In 1926 he played for First, a club in Vienna, and finally landed in Catalonia after dazzling everyone with a European tour with First, a team that at Christmas 1925 would beat Barça in Les Corts 1-4. That adventure would not last a year, although he had time to win a Championship of Catalonia and a Copa del Rey against Athletic Club from February to December 1926. In addition, among other tasks within Barça, he was in charge of coaching the promising youngsters, which makes him one of the fathers of Barça’s youth football. It was a Barça that, thanks to personalities like Jack Greenwell, was already betting on touch football. A club that looked abroad to learn. And football in central Europe was then a fertile space for ideas, which is why shortly before a Hungarian, Jesza Pozsonyi, had become one of the first Barça coaches to opt for a training system. A system that Kohn would improve in those months he was in Barcelona. Kohn was able to work with a golden Barça, with Samitier, Paulino Alcántara, Sagi or a Hungarian like Plattko. But it does not take root in Barcelona.
Turned into a vagabond, in the 1920s we find him at the Sportfreunde in Stuttgart, the Polish Warszawianka or the German VfR Mannheim. And finally, at Bayern, where players like Sigmund Haringer would explain: “We always wanted to play attack. With him we learned a lot, such as positioning ourselves on the pitch to attack better.” In his early days at the new club, Kohn signed Mannheim star Oskar Rohr and told the press that “above all, it is important to adapt training with the ball to the game in competition. It is necessary to create complicated situations for training sessions that allow you to be prepared for matches “. His obsession was to work professionally, and he claimed that two one-hour workouts during the week, as was normal then in Germany, was too little. “The seventy or eighty hours of the year are actually too little for proper training. So it’s up to the coach, in addition to the physical work, to see above all the mistakes and give his instructions based on these technical deficiencies, ”he would explain.
The president who had signed him then was Kurt Landauer, who claimed that signing foreign technicians was a good idea to improve and learn. In an increasingly nationalist Germany, Bayern was inspired outside their homeland, with a Jewish president and coach. Landauer, in fact, would end up being sent to the Dachau camp when the Nazis came to power, although he was able to flee to Switzerland after paying a lot of money. Kohn’s arrival allowed Bayern to make a leap in quality, as he went on to become both “masseur, general manager, physical trainer and coach”, according to the official book of Bayern history. Self-taught, the Viennese set up a vice-presidency office where he worked with Siegfried Herrmann to better organize day-to-day life. For the first time there was a person in charge of organizing the trips, someone who took care of the footballers’ diets, and the training sessions were planned with monthly plans. In 1932, Bayern were proclaimed champions of Germany for the first time by defeating Eintracht in the final, a final in which Kohn had everything scheduled, from meals to train travel, to walks outside the ‘hotel. Kohn, as he had done at Barça, was looking for a manager to modernize Bayern’s training football. The one in charge was Otto Albert Beer, who was Jewish like him. Beer would be assassinated by the Nazis in the Kaunas ghetto in 1941. Kohn fled to Switzerland, where he maintained contact with Landauer.
Football historian Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling, however, explains that it is not yet clear why Kohn left the club where he worked before Bayern: Munich in 1860. The Viennese had been signed by the city’s oldest club. , a club with a more conservative social mass and less open-minded than Bayern. If there were many episodes of resistance against Nazism within Bayern, most of the 1860 executives were early Nazis. Kohn would work there from 1928 to 1930, just when characters such as Fritz Ebenböck, who took part in the 1923 Munich Putsch with Hitler, or Sebastian Gleixner, a member of the SA who led him, began to take over the club. military uniform at club meetings. Although Schulze-Marmeling has found no evidence that Kohn left because he was Jewish, he must have felt more comfortable at Bayern, where he left when the Nazis came to power, and lived a second stint at Barça that went be a failure, to the point that the team finished second in the queue avoiding the descent by very little. Kohn himself, as well as the players, went so far as to ask to charge less as penance.
Kohn, who died in 1963 and it is not known where World War II took place, would become a well-respected name at Feyenoord, where he trained before and after the war and tried new tactics and won the first Dutch titles. Rotterdam club, where he would be known as “the doctor” because, in addition to coaching, he healed injured footballers. His life was always football. So much so that he often slept in the stadium at Bayern and Barça.
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