It starts getting a little rough on the bottom of the table in the German Bundesliga. VfB Stuttgart and 1.FC Nürnberg are both in trouble and danger of getting relegated and after their defeats on the 21st matchday have now pulled the rip cord almost simultaneously.
Especially at Nürnberg, the last of the tables, the past days have been quite turbulent. After not having been able to win for 15 match days, the club announced the break-up from sports director Andreas Bornemann on Tuesday.
One of the main reasons seems to have been that Bornemann had spoken out in favour of coach Michael Köllner, that he should remain with the club and that the situation in the team was intact. The board of directors saw it quite differently and decided to prematurely terminate the contract with the sports director, who had only taken over this office in Nürnberg at the end of last September.
And as was announced yesterday, the days of head coach Michael Köllner are now also counted and he too can now start looking for a new club. Since the end of September the club could not win any league game, and at this point the repeated slipping down to the last table place was probably too much for the club officials, which is why they are now trying to save the situation with a clear cut.
Marek Mintál and former co-coach Boris Schommers were introduced as interim coaches, but according to the chairman of the board of directors, they are now looking for a new sports director, who will then be assigned the task of finding a new coach himself.
In the next weeks it will remain exciting for the club, and it may take some time until this new situation is solved.
And there is a similar situation in Stuttgart, who are on position 16 in the Bundesliga standings. The VfB Stutttgart decided to split up with their sports director Michael Reschke.
Stuttgart has only been able to collect 15 points so far this season and is therefore only two points ahead of the very last, 1.FC Nürnberg, and they are too in acute danger of relegation. The results so far this season were clearly not enough for the clubs management, so after former coach Tayfun Korkut who had to take his bag and go after the 7th matchday, Reschke now is the next person in charge who gets fired.
A big argument might have been his transfer policy. 47 million Euros were put into new players before the season, and only 17 million Euros came from their own sales.
The successor for the position as sports director has already been determined, the former national player Thomas Hitzlsperger is to take over this position from now on. Fans of the English Premier League should recall that name from Hitzlsperger's time at West Ham United or with Everton F.C.
Whether this measure now also has influence on the future of Stuttgart coach Markus Weinzierl, will be seen in the near future. Weinzierl has only been able to collect 10 points from his 14 league games with VfB Stuttgart so far, and it is unlikely that he met the expectations the club had in his new coach.
We can only hope that for the 1.FC Nürnberg and for VfB Stuttgart these measures will bring about the desired success and will not go up in smoke, as it is often the case with coach or manager changes. We will know the answer to this question by the end of the season at the latest.
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