Football national team
Only one national coach was more unsuccessful than Flick
Status: 11:16 a.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
“It all went haywire,” says Flick after the international debacle
After the next setback for the national team, national coach Hansi Flick was self-critical. “It went completely wrong,” said the 58-year-old after the once again disappointing performance of the DFB-Elf against Colombia – and announced the consequences.
Hans-Dieter Flick started his term of office with eight wins. Since then, the national team has stumbled from game to game. Only one national coach has an even worse point average: Erich Ribbeck. He was fired after a preliminary round.
Hansi Flick seemed at a loss. After the 2-0 defeat by Colombia, the national coach stood on the sidelines and tried to explain the renewed defeat. The 58-year-old didn’t succeed. “I am very disappointed that we are not doing what we set out to do. We wanted to try something that went haywire. The arguments are not on our side,” said Flick.
In the national team, a lot has gone wrong under Flick since the World Cup in Qatar last year, which ended with an embarrassing end in the preliminary round. The team has won just four of their last 16 games. There were only wins against Oman, Costa Rica, Peru and Italy.
Flick, who started his position as national coach with eight wins, has only scored an average of 1.79 points from his 24 games. In the history of the German Football Association (DFB), only one coach was worse than him in this statistic: Erich Ribbeck. Probably nobody else stood for the rumble football of a national team as much as he did. Ribbeck succeeded Berti Vogts in 1998 after losing the World Cup in the quarter-finals against Croatia. After 24 games and being eliminated in the preliminary round of the European Championship, Ribbeck was released after less than two years. The then 63-year-old averaged 1.5 points per game.
Who is the boss? National coach Erich Ribbeck (right) at the 2000 European Championships with his then leading player Lothar Matthäus
Source: pa/dpa/Franz-Peter Tschauner
The figures from two world champion coaches show that these statistics are not necessarily an indication of success. Sepp Herberger (1.87) and Franz Beckenbauer (1.89) were only slightly better than Flick during their tenures. The top coach is Berti Vogts, who led the national team to the European Championship title in 1996 and scored 2.18 out of three possible points per game.
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The 76-year-old defends Flick. “Hansi Flick is not to blame at all. The DFB makes mistakes when it comes to training coaches, and there is also a lack of quality in the team. When Hansi Flick took over, he also took on the players who had previously been trained in the clubs,” said Vogts.
Calmund sees a quality problem and defends Flick
Reiner Calmund sees it that way too. The former manager of Bayer Leverkusen sees a quality problem in the national team and not a coaching problem. “What should he do? Another coach wouldn’t have any other player material either.” According to the 74-year-old, it starts in the storm, “where we don’t have a classic goalscorer like we’ve had for years”. Then you can look at top teams in the Bundesliga like FC Bayern Munich or RB Leipzig, where mainly foreign professionals play in the central defense. The national team is also lacking in defenders at the highest international level.
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“It is important for now that we scale back our expectations. We don’t have that potential and we can’t blame the players for that,” said Calmund. “Instead, we have to ask ourselves: What can we improve when it comes to working with young people? We don’t have the direct striker, so how do we get them trained again? That needs to be worked on.”
The point average of the national coaches
Berti Vogts 2.20 Jupp Derwall 2.18 Helmut Schön and Joachim Löw 2.09 Jürgen Klinsmann 2.06 Otto Nerz 1.91 Franz Beckenbauer 1.89 Sepp Herberger 1.87 Rudi Völler 1.83 Hansi Flick 1.79 Erich Ribbeck 1.50
