Dn the course of his work as a manager of respectable brands in football, Jochen Schneider has repeatedly experienced the enormous pressure that one can be exposed to in one’s job. The experience was worst before he was kicked out in February 2021, when the business administration graduate was in charge of FC Schalke 04 and the team had a spectacular series of 30 matches without a win. Every turn of the adjusting screws failed. Among them: the commitment of numerous new coaches within a very short time.
The 51-year-old doesn’t have such problems at his new job with the New York Red Bulls. As the sports director of a football franchise in the American Major League Soccer, you are not plagued by specters like second division. The league, with its 28 teams divided into two regional teams, knows no relegation. And even mediocre seasonal performances can still be converted into titles thanks to the play-offs.
MLS a league full of special features
Which is why the fans react relatively stoically to the ups and downs in the table. Even in New York with its high standards when it comes to sports. Because there the core of the supporters – be it in baseball, football, basketball or ice hockey – are recruited from a rather “melodramatic bunch”, as the “New York Times” once put it. They don’t rebel right away when things aren’t going well. They just hope for next season.
Nevertheless, the new head of sport on Saturday, at his first public appearance after his arrival in June, dealt with any expectations in a very differentiated manner. On the one hand, the team is in fourth place in the Eastern Conference and welcomed it with a series of losses and “a sloppy performance” in the home game against the Colorado Rapids, which they lost 4-5.
But on the other hand, you have “a great group of players and a fantastic team of coaches” led by Austrian Gerhard Struber, who came from the third English division in 2020 and who Schneider has known for a long time. The goal is therefore to win the title. Something that the team, which was one of the founding members of the league under the name New York/New Jersey MetroStars and was bought by the Red Bull fizzy company in 2006, has never managed to do. Surprising actually. Because in Major League Soccer, Schneider knows, all the teams are “close together. Not like in Germany, where you can already say today who will win the league.”
Has got around a lot in football: Jochen Schneider, here 2020
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Image: dpa
Schneider would therefore like to dispel the suspicion that the New York branch of the group’s football department should possibly only deliver promising American youngsters to the economically more important branches in Salzburg and Leipzig. “We’re not a farm team,” he said.
At least not a particularly profitable one. Because the franchise’s training academy has been producing players for years who can keep up at the league level, and so far has only produced one young player of stature: national player Tyler Adams, who after three years at RB Leipzig is going to Leeds and the American coach before this season Jesse Marsch moved to the Premier League. And for a respectable transfer fee of around 20 million euros.
Incidentally, Schneider is not the only sporting director from Germany in a league that, with its special features such as the highly paid old stars, the draft system and the cap on salaries, requires a special feel for forming successful personnel constellations, but currently already the third. At the Philadelphia Union, for example, Ernst Tanner has been successfully responsible for sporting director since 2018, a franchise that has only played in the MLS since 2010.
The 55-year-old from Upper Bavaria was head of the youth academy of the Austrian series champion Red Bull Salzburg before he left for the United States. Tanner, who is regarded as the discoverer of David Alaba, has settled into American conditions very well. He extended his contract a year ago and sounded more than satisfied in an interview with Sport1: “I have a very good job. I can design everything here and develop things. This is very difficult in Germany due to the high pressure on earnings. Especially if, like me, you always see everything holistically, combine good youth work with a strong transition and still want to play successfully.
So successful that the team currently leads the Eastern Conference table with 51 points and with seven games before the end of the regular season is almost certain to qualify for the playoffs that start in October.
Such experiences are yet to come for the sporting director of St. Louis SC. For football globetrotter and former goalkeeper Lutz Pfannenstiel, business will only start in earnest next season, when the franchise, whose infrastructure he has been developing since 2020, officially joins Major League Soccer.
The philosophy he has developed for signing squad members will be revealed in the expansion draft in a few months. This is a special mechanism whereby a new team has access to the pool of players signed to existing teams. However, the system only allows a limited amount of talent looting. Which is why new franchises traditionally don’t work miracles in the first few years. Even Inter Miami, the MLS project of soccer icon David Beckham, who has been there since 2020, has only been in the middle of the field so far.
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