Just three days after losing the Champions League, VfL Wolfsburg falls even further behind in the Bundesliga. The Volkswagen Club has now lost five games in a row.
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Jörg Schmadtke is criticized by some Wolfsburg fans. Photo: Swen Pförtner / dpa (Image: dpa)
(Photo: Swen Pförtner / dpa)
Wolfsburg – Even 5000 spectators in an almost empty football stadium can sometimes be really loud. In Wolfsburg, they whistled out their team on Saturday evening.
She had only been kicked out of the Champions League three days earlier and now suffered the fifth consecutive defeat in the 0-2 (0-1) against VfB Stuttgart in the Bundesliga. The new thing about it, and until recently hardly imaginable, was that some fans also shouted “Schmadtke out”! It wasn’t the majority of the 5000, nor did they shout that for half the evening. But it is remarkable that VfL’s sports director is approached so publicly at all.
Because Jörg Schmadtke is responsible for an upswing in Wolfsburg, which began shortly after the second almost relegation in 2018 and only three years later temporarily ended in the Champions League. VfL’s sporting problems are worsening from game to game, but they are also the first tangible crisis in his almost three and a half years of work at the Volkswagen Club. The reactions outside the fan curve were correspondingly loyal.
«Schmadtke has built something unprecedented here»
Schmadtke’s sports director and closest colleague Marcel Schäfer spoke of a “brazenness”. And coach Florian Kohfeldt, only brought in by Schmadtke and Schäfer at the end of October, defended his boss. “The calls are absolutely understandable for me,” he said. «Jörg Schmadtke has built something unprecedented here since the beginning. As a manager, he took over a team after relegation and has now led them into international business three times. ” He thinks the criticism is “very early”.
The Schmadtke topic also shows how tense the situation in Wolfsburg is right now. The 57-year-old himself ended his weeks of public restraint on Saturday and gave two TV interviews. At Sky he stood in front of his troubled team before the Stuttgart game (“VfL Wolfsburg is not the shame of German football”). In the ZDF sports studio, he did not comment on the calls in the stadium, but did practice self-criticism.
“We have to go through there now”
“I’m responsible for the planning.” And the development of this season is “of course also a planning error,” said Schmadtke. “We performed extremely well for three years – with the end result that we qualified for the Champions League. Then we tried to take the next step in our development. And that failed, you have to hold on to that. ”
In his area of responsibility, the trainer question falls above all. The successful Oliver Glasner moved to Frankfurt in the summer because he and Schmadtke no longer understood each other. Getting the former Bayern captain Mark van Bommel on for him was a mistake that the experienced manager corrected after nine Bundesliga games. Van Bommel’s successor explicitly protected Schmadtke. “Florian Kohfeldt currently has to pay for things that he is not responsible for,” he said. “We will get out of there with him because he recognizes things, because he addresses them clearly and because – when the time comes – we will change them too.”
And that’s at least how solidarity works in Wolfsburg in this crisis. The supervisory board would like Schmadtke to stay (“Then there is a likelihood that I will extend a year”). The head of sport supports the coach – and the coach his team, which has been weakened even further by the serious injury to Paulo Otavio (knee). “Nobody wants to get into such a phase,” said Kohfeldt. “But we have to go through it now, stay stable and shake off the frustration.”
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 211212-99-350908 / 4
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