The New Gaffer: Introducing Jol at Hamburg

Fred Rut­ten isn’t the only new Dutch man­ager in the Bun­desliga, as ex-Tottenham Mar­tin Jol took over the reigns of Ham­burg ear­lier this month. It’s been nearly 30 years since Jol’s last appear­ance in Ger­many. He made 9 appear­ances for Bay­ern Munich as a mid­fielder in 1978/79 before return­ing to the Nether­lands the next sea­son. His man­age­r­ial jour­ney has now mir­rored his play­ing career, rotat­ing among the north­west­ern Euro­pean tri­an­gle of the Nether­lands, Eng­land and Ger­many. This time around he hopes to spend more than a year in the Bundesliga.

Jol will be Hamburg’s 26th gaffer in the past 45 years. While this seems like a lot it’s actu­ally the norm for the league (as next week’s entry on Bruno Lab­ba­dia will detail). The only man­ager to last longer than 4 years at Ham­burg? Ernst Hap­pel. Yes, he of Ernst-Happel-Stadion fame (the sta­dium was named for the two time Euro­pean Cup win­ner and not vice versa, in case you were won­der­ing). While fans would love it if Jol could emu­late Happel’s Euro­pean tri­umphs, they’d be sat­is­fied with repli­cat­ing his domes­tic suc­cess. Coin­ci­den­tally both Hap­pel and Jol began their man­age­r­ial careers at ADO Den Haag. Any­way, it’s been 25 years since he Hap­pel brought home the team’s last cham­pi­onship. Since then they’ve been a steady, if not spec­tac­u­lar, club:

They own the unique dis­tinc­tion of being the only remain­ing orig­i­nal Bun­desliga side never to have been rel­e­gated. To con­tinue stay­ing afloat in the Bun­desliga and hope­fully chal­lenge for sil­ver­ware Ham­burg must first and fore­most con­tinue devel­op­ing their Dutch pipeline.

Cur­rently Ham­burg employ four Dutch play­ers in their first team: Joris Math­i­jsen, Nigel de Jong, Romeo Caste­len, and cap­tain Rafael van der Vaart. Chelsea-flop Khalid Boulahrouz is also a recent mem­ber of this group. Together they com­prise the second-largest national con­tin­gent in the squad and arguably its most tal­ented. Ham­burg has devel­oped in some­what of a Dutch Por­tu­gal. Por­tu­gal, for obvi­ous rea­sons, is the des­ti­na­tion of choice for young Brazil­ian tal­ent mak­ing their ini­tial move to Europe. Those who dis­play enough promise are then snapped up by larger clubs. A crude anal­ogy, to be sure, but it effec­tively describes the sit­u­a­tion. Like the Bun­desliga at large, Ham­burg in par­tic­u­lar has evolved into a show­room for for­eign tal­ent before it moves on to more lucra­tive Eng­lish or Mediter­ranean shores.

The most obvi­ous exam­ple of this will soon be Rafael van der Vaart, who has made his feel­ings quite clear about leav­ing Ham­burg over the past year. For a time the rumor was that he’d end up at the Mestalla with Valen­cia. Now the bids have cen­tered around the Span­ish cap­i­tal, either as part of Atletico’s sum­mer sign­ing spree or as Real’s ersatz Ronaldo. Although his con­tract runs through the 2009–2010 sea­son it is clear that he is on his way out and almost cer­tainly to the land of his mother’s birth. Ham­burg would be well-advised to sell soon rather than risk los­ing a hefty (approx­i­mately 15 mil­lion Euro) trans­fer fee thanks to the Bosman rul­ing.

The best way to spend the van der Vaart money would be exactly how the club has in the past, on young play­ers. While no one has or will likely ever con­fuse Ham­burg for Arse­nal, the club have made the deci­sion to pur­sue mostly young pro­fes­sion­als (three of the four Dutch play­ers above are 25 or younger, for instance). It seems unlikely that Jol will alter this pol­icy, although were he to try he’d find him­self deal­ing with a much stingier board than Tottenham’s (and he won’t have a repeat of his run-in with Spurs’ direc­tor of foot­ball Damien Comolli).

Is Jol the man to have Ham­burg fans par­ty­ing like it’s 1983? Is there a limit to how many Dutch play­ers Ger­man fans can stom­ach in the squad? Is it only a mat­ter of time before Ham­burg, tak­ing their cue from North Lon­don, replace Jol with Sevilla’s cur­rent coach, Manolo Jimenez?

Next Week: Bruno Lab­ba­dia at Bayer Leverkusen

Tagged as: ADO Den Haag, Arsenal, Atletico Madrid, Bosman, Brazil, Bruno Labbadia, Damien Comolli, England, Ernst Happel, European Cup, FC Bayern München, Germany, Joris Mathijsen, Khalid Boulahrouz, Manolo Jimenez, Netherlands, Nigel de Jong, Portugal, Rafael van der Vaart, Real Madrid, Romeo Castelen, Sevilla, Tottenham