The Turbine Potsdam footballers have a new coach. As the Bundesliga club announced on Tuesday morning, the Austrian Kurt Russ will take over command of the sidelines with immediate effect. The 59-year-old was most recently active for the Austrian third division club ASKÖ Oedt.
Russ succeeds Marco Gebhardt and Dirk Heinrichs in Potsdam. After a very bad start to the season with zero points and a goal difference of 0:16 in the first five league games, Turbine parted ways with the coaching duo last Sunday. With Russ, a coach is now supposed to initiate the turnaround, whose football resume so far only includes clubs from the various leagues in his home country.
Among other things, Russ played 262 games in the Austrian Bundesliga. There were also 28 international matches and a dozen appearances in what was then the UEFA Cup. After his career ended, he switched to coaching, where he took over various clubs from the Upper Austria League to the 2nd Bundesliga. He looked after SV Kapfenberg there for a total of five years and led them to fourth place in the second division in the 2014/15 and 2018/19 seasons.
Russ was also introduced to the Turbine Potsdam players on Tuesday morning. “And then we go straight to work,” said club president Karsten Ritter-Lang on Monday in an interview with rbb about the start of the then unknown coach. In addition to an increase in performance, Ritter-Lang also hopes for a coaching effect on an individual level: “We see individual weaknesses in some players and it is of course now the coach’s job to develop these.”
Kurt Russ will make his debut on the Turbine Potsdam sidelines on Friday evening (6:30 p.m.). Then his team will meet SGS Essen in the Karl Liebknecht Stadium on matchday six of the current Bundesliga season. With a win, the hosts could at least temporarily leave the bottom of the table and move past 1. FC Köln and Carl Zeiss Jena.
Broadcast: Antenne BRandenburg from rbb, October 8th, 2024, 11:00 a.m
