It’s a good day, Olaf Rebbe is in a great mood. The sports director of 1. FC Nürnberg sips his Radler, then puts the clay mug on the table in front of him, takes his mobile phone out of his pocket and shows a news story with Mario Gomez. He, Rebbe, still knows him from their time together at VfL Wolfsburg. A few days ago he wrote to him again to ask him about an old jersey as a present for the big Gomez fan Christoph Daferner.
It’s July 23rd, the club have just won the first Frankenderby of the season and Daferner, the new centre-forward who has arrived from Dresden, has sealed victory with the first goal. Now Rebbe sits in a room reserved for the players, their families and those in charge. The next day there is a mini-triathlon in which Rebbe will start together with sports director Dieter Hecking and junior manager Michael Wiesinger, but now it’s time to savor the 2-0 win against Fürth.
Rebbe, 45, picks up his mug again, then he talks about Daferner, who is not only a fan of Gomez, but also has a similar system. What the sports director cannot yet know on this day: Daferner will only score two goals in the whole season and will be one of many disappointments at the end of a completely failed year.
Even getting into the quarter-finals of the DFB Cup can’t whitewash the completely unsuccessful season
The fact that Nuremberg at least avoided relegation last Sunday with a 1-0 win in Paderborn does not gloss over how much has gone wrong this season. A poor preparation, after which the team was not fit enough, a mistake with the appointment of coach Markus Weinzierl and a long list of injuries that kept the club busy: It was a pretty messed up year, even since 2012 first-time entry into the quarter-finals of the DFB Cup pushed into the background and now requires a fundamental reappraisal.
“Now don’t show false pride Dieter – resignation before dismissal, for the benefit of the association!”. This sentence was on a banner that the Nuremberg fans unrolled in Paderborn on Sunday. And in fact, the club has to ask itself this question: Can Hecking continue? Or is he not too beaten to just leave the training ground and return to his desk in his board office?
When he was asked that himself after the last game of the season, Hecking replied: “We’ll now take our time to analyze and think about whatever form we’ll use to plan next season.” He faces the criticism, “that was always my nature,” emphasized Hecking, but also brought up plus points and mitigating circumstances for the crisis. “We’ve got a lot on the way now,” said the sporting director, “that things didn’t go that way this season, there are definitely objective reasons for that.”
What Hecking can actually claim for himself, despite all the criticism, are, for example, the personal details of Nathaniel Brown, 19, and Can Uzun, 17. In the middle of the relegation battle, it was quite daring to rely on two talents whose time is yet to come, but it did the team extremely good and pointed to a future that should be better than the recent past.
One of the big questions in Nuremberg is whether Dieter Hecking can continue
Hecking, 58, started as a sports director in Nuremberg three years ago to help the club get back on its feet – and then to lead it upwards. In the summer of 2020, when the end of the corona pandemic was far from in sight, Hecking found a club in shock when he arrived at the Valznerweiher. The club had just saved themselves in the second leg of the relegation against FC Ingolstadt with a goal in the sixth minute of added time – now Hecking should lead FCN to more consistent and successful times. Nine months later Rebbe arrived in Nuremberg and alongside Hecking built a squad that played well the following season. The team was involved in the promotion race up to the 31st match day, but in the end they finished eighth. As we now know, since Hecking’s return it should be the highest of feelings.
The fact that after the season, which ended in eighth place, he called the first third of the table as a goal, “I should have given it to myself,” said Hecking on Sunday, when this year was behind him to forget. The sporting misery, the constant unrest, the setbacks and resistance that Nuremberg had to deal with time and time again, all this has gone to the substance of the club. The past few months have drained and taken a lot of strength, now the club is facing big questions.
What will become of Hecking? What is the role of the supervisory board around the chairman Thomas Grethlein in the crisis? And should it be the previous assistant Cristian Fiel who replaces Hecking as coach? At 1. FC Nürnberg it’s all about the big picture again. The positive cup season, the Rebbe drinking Radler, Daferner as a derby hero, all of that is very far away in early summer 2023 – but everything should have turned out very differently.
