Et is once again a curious situation that the FC Schalke 04 professional team, which has been shaken by so many adversities and twists and turns, has to deal with this week. The players will enter the final phase of the season with a new head coach, who is absent due to a corona infection.
And Mike Büskens is not that new either. The 53-year-old club icon was previously one of the assistants to Dimitrios Grammozis, who was released on Sunday, which has bizarre consequences. Actually, those responsible wanted to set new “impulses” with the change of coach in order to still be able to achieve promotion, which has recently become increasingly unlikely, as sporting director Rouven Schröder explained on Tuesday morning. But now not only Grammozis is gone, but also the new coach and the assistant who was Büskens until Sunday.
From the quarantine, Büskens promised that he would do everything in his power to ensure that his team acted “as a close-knit community” from now on, as a team that finally developed its potential, “in terms of football and character”. Somehow this new twist seemed rather improvised at a turbulent time, although Schröder did his best to portray Büskens’ promotion as a well-considered consequence of a ‘developmental process’. The change of coach, which was made after a wild 3: 4 defeat against the relegation candidate Hansa Rostock, was “not a gut decision” and not an act of desperation, assured the sports director.
The idea that the financially troubled club could be forced to rise after the end of the lucrative partnership with the Russian state-owned company Gazprom is wrong. There is a three-year plan, and if a club “sets up such a concept and has to be promoted in the first year, something would not fit,” said Schröder, who says he has made no attempts to hire an external coach. He is simply convinced “that this path is the right one, because we simply feel Mike’s strength and because he sees the rough edges”.
A fundamental break, as a result of which the team will start the spring with completely new ideas, is not to be expected. Büskens bears a lot of responsibility for the results, which became increasingly unsatisfactory in the second half of the season. Schröder therefore made an effort to explain why the change of coach will still have the hoped-for effect: As head coach, Büskens is “much closer to the team with his language”, also in terms of “gestures and facial expressions”, moreover “the focus is on the team much more on the head coach,” he explained. “That’s the distribution of roles, the head coach is the head coach, has his sovereignty,” the assistant, on the other hand, is “a supplier, but not the implementer.”
How exactly Büskens, as the implementer, is supposed to get a grip on the problems that Grammozis was unable to solve remained unclear for the time being. The now dismissed coach was accused of not having worked flexibly and creatively enough. In the second half of the season he hadn’t found any effective countermeasures against weaknesses in defense and his plan of attack was also perceived as too one-dimensional: ball into the penalty area – Simon Terodde – goal.
Since Büskens was not noticed as either a great innovator or a tactical nerd, the main effect of his promotion is more likely to be seen on an emotional level. Such a change of coach “can’t leave any player cold,” said Schröder, “so we all have a duty to play better football. Everyone has to improve, no question about it.” Because the starting position is by no means hopeless, despite the six points behind a promotion place.
Apart from Hamburger SV, Schalke still plays against all other teams from the top third of the table, with a winning streak at the right moment a lot is still possible. And yet the change of coach makes it clear that those critics who doubted Grammozis’ suitability for the project resurgence last year were correct. Apparently not even Schröder was completely convinced of Grammozis, at least in his first weeks at Schalke he was concerned with the question of whether there wasn’t a better person to fill the head coaching position than Grammozis, hired a year ago by sports director Peter Knäbel. People like Thomas Letsch (Vitesse Arnheim), Bartosch Gaul (Mainz 05 U 23) and Kosta Runjaic (Pogon Stettin) are said to have been discussed, all of whom are now working very successfully in their clubs and are not available spontaneously.
Schröder assured on Tuesday that he was not overruled by his boss Knäbel at the time, but that all decisions were made together. But in the search for the coach for the coming season, his word may carry more weight than it did last spring.
