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— Profile —
LMA PEOPLE
the
manager
WINTER 2011
People often talk
about the ‘international
language of football’, but sometimes you need a little
more than that to allow effective communication. One
such occasion was the recent Internationaler Trainer-
Kongress (International Coaches’ Congress), hosted by
the German Football Coaches’ Association (the BDFL).
Although the 1,100 delegates included visitors from
as far afield as Iceland and Scandinavia, the event was
conducted in German, with no translation. This,
however, wasn’t a serious problem for the LMA’s (and,
indeed, the UK’s) sole representative, as Mark
McGhee is close to being fluent in German,
having learned the language during the
two years he spent as a player with
Hamburg in the mid 1980s.
“My German’s okay,” says the
former Wolves and Leicester
manager. “It’s a long time since I
lived there, but I’ve been back and
forth often enough over the years
to keep my hand in.”
The event’s theme, inspired by
the recent successes enjoyed by
Spain and Barcelona, was ‘quick
change’. All of the sessions and
demonstrations were designed to
encourage the quick, short-passing
game employed by those two sides.
McGhee felt that this showed a
vulnerability in the German psyche
which he wasn’t expecting: “I got the
impression that there was a lot of
self-doubt running through German football. It
was obvious that this had been created by Spain
and Barcelona. The impression I got was that the
Germans felt they were falling behind Spain, which
is a bit hard to understand when you think that
Germany qualified for next year’s European
Championship without dropping a point.”
The sole voice speaking against this tide of
pessimism was Matthias Sammer – the
former international sweeper and
Manager’s playing spell in Germany pays off at international coaching conference
McGHEE goes
international
current technical director of the German Football
Association (DFB). “Sammer pointed out that there are
a lot of good things going on in German football,” says
McGhee. “He argued quite sensibly that it would be
crazy for German football to try to imitate the Spanish;
that they should instead learn what they can from them
and assimilate it into what they’re already doing.”
In addition to being able to gauge the current feeling
within Germany at first hand, McGhee enjoyed the
conference for other reasons: “I caught up with people I
haven’t seen for a while, such as [BDFL
general secretary] Karlheinz Raviol who
ensured that I was never left out of
anything. I also met up with the
man I replaced at Hamburg,
Horst Hrubesch, which was
great as I’d never really spent
any time with him before.”
And it wasn’t just about
networking either, as
McGhee explains: “On
the coaching side I saw
a few things that I
hadn’t come across
before, which made me
a bit frustrated that I’m
not in management at
the moment. To be
honest, I wanted to get
straight out on the
training pitch and put
some of what I’d
learned into
practice.”
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