Further Steps Back – Hertha BSC Sacked Coach Lucien Favre

It’s one of the worst sit­u­a­tions in foot­ball busi­ness, when you have no more oppor­tu­ni­ties to resort to excuses, espe­cially when you’re mainly respon­si­ble for the pros­per­ity of your team.

Hertha BSC-manager Lucien Favre lived through this said sit­u­a­tion at the press con­fer­ence after Hertha’s 1:5 loss against TSG 1899 Hof­fen­heim and the six straight loss in a row. “I’ve noth­ing to explain – no com­ment,” said Favre at the press con­fer­ence. One day after his admis­sion, Favre was sacked by his club.

After Favre’s fir­ing, the club has to think of some del­i­cate ques­tions: What did go wrong since the past sea­son? What hap­pened with this team, that played foot­ball at its best dur­ing the most of the past sea­son and was red-hot favourite win­ning the title?

The cur­rent team isn’t com­pa­ra­ble to the last year’s team, which united a still divided fan base in Berlin. The team’s per­for­mance pop­u­lar­ized the club through­out the whole city, which inhab­i­tants aren’t known for ador­ing foot­ball. But peo­ple flocked into the sta­dium to watch their new beloved team.

One rea­son for this said crash is per­son­nel pol­icy dur­ing the sum­mer break. The team lost Josip Simu­nic, its defen­sive leader, the Croa­t­ian defender was the main fac­tor of Hertha’s strong defen­sive per­for­mance last sea­son. Fur­ther­more the team lost its two best strik­ers Marko Pan­telic and Andrej Voronin, who went back to Liverpool.

The trans­fers to bal­ance the losses of these key play­ers all failed. Either Artur Wich­niarek or Adrian Ramos aren’t in the shape of tak­ing over the posi­tions of the for­mer key players.

A fur­ther rea­son was the dis­crep­ancy about man­ag­ing the club. The for­mer team manger Dieter Hoeneß must recede from his posi­tion because of his con­tro­versy with other respon­si­ble per­sons in the club.

The new coach has to solve sev­eral prob­lems and must be pre­pared for a dif­fi­cult season.