An the end, after 18 years, everything happened very quickly. It was only on Friday afternoon that Oliver Bierhoff flew back home with national coach Hansi Flick and the national team after an all-round failed World Cup; at least with those who had not already said goodbye directly from Qatar for the vacation that had become possible far too soon.
Just three days later, the German Football Association (DFB) announced in a press release at 10:20 p.m. German time – the witching hour had already begun in Qatar – a decision that many football fans in the country felt was overdue. And now those responsible and Bierhoff considered it inevitable: “Oliver Bierhoff is terminating the contract with the DFB.”
The term of his last of numerous contracts with the association since 2004 also included the 2024 European Championship. But after the third failure of the national team in a row at two world championships and one European championship, accompanied by an unprecedented drop in popularity, after 18 years they didn’t go a day and not a step together. This event in their own country seems too important for the DFB to give Bierhoff another and third chance for renewal. The DFB sees the EM 2024 as a new beginning.
With Bierhoff’s farewell, an era ends for the national team and in the DFB that could hardly be more ambivalent: the grandiose sporting and social rise beginning with the 2006 World Cup in Germany and the World Cup triumph eight years later in Rio de Janeiro up to the “quasi fourth Power in the state” (Bierhoff in 2015 after a corresponding study commissioned by the DFB) only leaden years followed since the 2018 World Cup.
The separation from the former manager of the national team, who last worked as Managing Director National Teams and Academy of DFB GmbH & Co KG, is a turning point for the association a year and a half before the EM 2024 – and a liberation.
New beginnings on all levels
Bierhoff himself expressed himself in the official DFB announcement in a detailed personal statement, which states, among other things: “After 18 years in responsible positions at the DFB, I have ended my work as Managing Director National Teams & Academy with immediate effect. I agreed on this today with President Bernd Neuendorf. I pave the way for setting new directions.” You could say that. Only with his retirement is a fresh start possible for the national team and the association at all levels.
After the 2018 World Cup, Bierhoff believed that he could still do it together with national coach Joachim Löw and then after the European Championship in 2021 without his long-standing closest partner in the national team. Both assumptions turned out to be wrong – the bill was paid by the once most popular team in the country, which has not been able to get out of its low for more than four years. In the long-standing doubles with Löw, there was no turning point. And Bierhoff’s recourse in the summer of 2021 to his former assistant Hansi Flick as the new number one in the national team turned out to be a mere zero-sum game at the World Cup in Qatar: nothing got better.
Alienated from the fans
The national team disappointed in sporting terms and continued to alienate themselves from their fans, even under a generally down-to-earth national coach. The farce about the “One Love” bandage around the opening game against Japan and the mouth-to-mouth action that distracted the team from its sporting goals and drove it apart in Qatar were the last mistakes that the DFB director made allowed.
