The first coaching change of this Bundesliga season has taken place at VfL Wolfsburg. Mark van Bommel has to go after just nine matchdays – an unusual but consistent decision by boss Jörg Schmadtke. kicker reporter Thomas Hiete comments
You said in the summer what you say when a new coach comes in. And yet it sounded like honest conviction from managing director Jörg Schmadtke and also sporting director Marcel Schäfer when they talked about their signing and the successor to the successful but unloved Oliver Glasner. “Mark van Bommel is our desired solution. We have dealt with him intensively and the personal talks have confirmed our impression that he fits our philosophy perfectly.” Now, almost five months later, there is not much of a philosophy left. And van Bommel dismissed.
It is the correction of a serious, actually the first real wrong decision of the management duo Schmadtke/Schäfer. Whatever they did in the past three and a half years was successful. Now the big misunderstanding in filling the coaching post. In recent years, the manager had repeatedly stressed that he was not a “coach killer” and acted accordingly. Although there was radio silence between him and Glasner for months, Schmadtke held on to the Austrian, they reached the Champions League together and only went their separate ways afterwards.
The team had doubts about the style of play for some time
With van Bommel, between whom and Schmadtke no dissonance is known, the next stage was to be reached. This turned into a rapid step backwards. Because the Dutchman, who was well received as a guy at the club and in the dressing room, did not manage to transfer his idea of the game, of which he repeatedly spoke more superficially than profoundly, to the team. Was the risk – these voices came from the team early on – of wanting to change the successful style of play too great? Was it even necessary to switch so radically from switching to possession football? Were the management and the football coaches even talking past each other in their ideas about the direction of the team?
Schmadtke and Schäfer’s doubts must have grown in recent weeks, ignited early on by van Bommel’s mistake in the DFB Cup. Even after four victories at the start, the coach was unable to take off the heavy rucksack he put on himself with this historic faux pas. The footballing regression set in quickly, the results were almost inevitably absent, and the conviction in the coach crumbled in the team and among those in charge with every further defeat. After Schmadtke had demanded in the previous week that “the right conclusions” be drawn from the poor development on the pitch, van Bommel insisted that he did not want to change anything – and thus possibly accelerated his sacking. This is unusual for Schmadtke, but in view of the development it is logical.