Exactly eight years ago, Klose celebrated his greatest success as a footballer with the World Cup title at the Maracana in Rio de Janeiro. The regional league team TWL Elektra is waiting there in the first round of the ÖFB Cup. “I was received very well and am completely satisfied,” said Klose before his first competitive game on the sidelines.
Klose avoids the hype about himself by working long days on the pitch, and the German record scorer doesn’t let the media get close either. In the first two weeks since it was presented in Altach, 20 inquiries had come in daily, most of them from Germany, said Altach’s press spokesman Manuel Willam. At Klose’s request, he blocked all inquiries, Willam revealed.
Klose is into “ball possession football”
At the press conference at the start of the season on Monday in Vienna, Klose broke his silence. What game philosophy does the former professional from Bayern Munich, Werder Bremen, Kaiserslautern and Lazio Rome stand for? “Ball possession football,” announced Klose. “I want to have the ball for a long time, to determine the game.” He was a striker himself, “so I want to play offensively, very dominantly, that’s my idea of football”.
In the past season, the Altachers escaped relegation with a win on the last day of the game, in the first three weeks Klose “already worked on a few things”. “The team is really good,” he said. The German has also almost overcome the small language barriers in Vorarlberg. “I understand almost 72 percent of them,” joked Klose, who now lives in Dornbirn.
Step by step into the trainer olympus
Klose is known as a meticulous worker who takes every step carefully and chooses his words carefully. In Altach he wants to build a foundation for a long coaching career. “The values that the club stands for, this down-to-earth attitude and doing things together, that’s exactly mine. That’s why I’m so looking forward to the task.” As a footballer, he “worked out a lot of things in order to be successful”, as he said, “that’s also my goal as a coach”. Accordingly, “the foundation must also be large”.
At some point it should go back to the big stage, but “everything step by step”, as Klose said: “Of course my goal is to train in the Bundesliga at some point. Anyone who knows me knows I’m going to take this really slowly and calmly. Every step has to be worked out, let’s see where the next few years will take me.”
Season goals remain secret
Klose, who scored a total of 71 goals in 137 international matches, ended his active career six years ago. He then gained initial experience as an assistant coach for the German Football Association (DFB) team, before taking on the role of FC Bayern U17s for two seasons. “I wanted to get to know the youth players, how they think about football. It’s a whole different generation,” he said.
In the 2020/21 season, Klose worked as a striker coach at Munich with players like Robert Lewandowski and learned as an assistant from the current German national coach Hansi Flick. “You learn every day how he treats players. For me, he has the biggest package that a coach can have,” said Klose.
This experience should now help Klose in Altach. In any case, he does not want to set any public goals for the coming season. “You have to work for everything every day, and we are there. Then we’ll see how far we can get,” he said. Klose thought the level of the league was good. “We can’t complain here in Austria, a decent ball is being played there.”
