30 years after his father, Toppmöller takes over Eintracht
As of 10:44 a.m
Klaus Toppmöller in the 1993/94 season on the Eintracht bench
Quelle: pa/Martina Hellmann
In 1993, Eintracht Frankfurt hired Klaus Toppmöller as head coach. His son Dino was twelve at the time. Now he is following in his father’s footsteps at the Hessian club. And will hope that he can stay longer than his old man once did.
FBundesliga soccer club Eintracht Frankfurt has clarified the open question as a coach and signed Dino Toppmöller as the new head coach. The 42-year-old succeeds Oliver Glasner and has a contract with Hessen until 2026, as Eintracht announced on Monday.
“I have followed Dino’s path for a long time and in Leipzig I was able to get an idea of his way of working, which is characterized by a high level of tactical understanding and analytical skills,” said sports director Markus Krösche in the statement: “The way , the way he lets football be played fits with our philosophy.”
Dino Toppmöller takes up his first head coaching position in the Bundesliga
Source: dpa/Sven Hoppe
For Toppmöller, who was Julian Nagelsmann’s assistant at RB Leipzig and FC Bayern Munich, it is the first head coaching position in the Bundesliga. Before his positions as an assistant coach, he looked after F91 Dudelange in Luxembourg and Royal Excelsior Virton in Belgium. Frankfurt had already announced the separation from Glasner in the first half of May.
“Because of my past, I’ve always had a special relationship with Eintracht,” said Toppmöller, who had been traded as a top candidate for the post for weeks. “I’m all the more pleased to be part of Eintracht again and I want to drive the positive development forward with my coaching team, the team and all the employees in the club,” he emphasized.
Fired after a 1: 2 at Bayern
Eintracht had deliberately waited for the end of the season and the cup final in Berlin before making the announcement. Toppmöller, whose father Klaus took over as Frankfurt’s head coach exactly 30 years ago, should confirm the great successes of the short Glasner era at the ambitious traditional club. The future sports director Timmo Hardung described him as a “great guy” and “world-class coach” even before the commitment.
Toppmöller junior will now hope that he has a longer half-life than his father once did. In 1993, when Dino was twelve, he made a sensational start and even celebrated the autumn championship with Eintracht. In the first half of the season, Jay-Jay-Okocha also scored one of the most legendary goals in Bundesliga history when he defeated the young Karlsruhe goalkeeper Oliver Kahn fooled again and again. The enthusiasm of the then Sat.1. commentator Jörg Dahlmann is also a piece of Bundesliga history.
After the winter break, however, there wasn’t much going on, also because top scorer Tony Yeboah was injured. On April 10, 1994, Toppmöller was released after a 1-2 draw at Bayern Munich while he was fifth in the table. Back then, with stars like Uwe Bein, Maurizio Gaudino, Yeboah and Okocha, the club had higher standards than it does today, but that still doesn’t have to make a coach too sure.
The Austrian Glasner won the Europa League with Frankfurt in 2022 and in the following season reached the final of the DFB Cup and the round of 16 of the Champions League, in which Eintracht started for the first time. In the league, however, he did not get past the eleventh and seventh places. The separation was the result of a negative sporting series in which Glasner increasingly lost his nerve and appeared irritated in media appearances.
