WSC 181 Mar 02

“We’re going to take off his kilt,” Hesse’s reg­ional governor Roland Koch said on hearing that Berti Vogts’s Scotland would be in Ger­many’s Euro 2004 qualifying group. So while the Scottish FA picked “the terrier”, back in Germany a pop­ulist politician feels he can get a few cheap laughs from picturing the former national team coach mooning from the Hamp­den dug­out. Such a difference in opinion needs explaining.

Berti Vogts was a member of the golden generation of German football, winning 96 caps, along with one European Championship and one World Cup. He had a hugely successful club career with Mönchen­gladbach. As a coach, he worked with Ger­many’s Under-16s, Under-18s and Under-20s, coaching players like Jürgen Klinsmann, Karlheinz Riedle and Andi Brehme. In 1986 he became national team assistant to Franz Beckenbauer, then took over after the glory of Italia 90. What he also inherited was the burden Beckenbauer left behind with his infamous “We will dom­inate world football” quote after the final.

In his eight years as national team coach, Vogts won a higher percentage of matches than Beckenbauer had. His team reached two European finals (winning one) and two World Cup quarter-finals. Yet never – not even at Wembley in 1996 – did he became the darling of the media or of the German football public.

Why was that? For a start, Vogts has always been “Berti”, the nice, not too bright work­horse, never respectable Hans-Hubert (his al­most forgotten real name). He only play­ed for one club, never leaving his beloved village of Korschenbroich. This endeared him to many, but it didn’t give him the glamour of a Beckenbauer or Netzer. The boy-next-door image made him the ideal youth coach, but it came back to haunt him when he was thrown into the media spotlight.

It wasn’t that his team play­ed a worse style of football than un­der his predecessor, but un­like Beckenbauer he never had a joke for the hacks, didn’t un­derstand their irony and some­times used press conferences to criticise the level of players’ wages. If Vogts applied for a job in your company, you’d put him in R&D; he never grasped that as national team coach he had to be head of sales. In retrospect, it was a miracle he lasted as long as he did.

A spell with Leverkusen last year showed he couldn’t run a team with 20 cocky millionaires. Their oversized egos had noth­ing to do with football the way he knew it. He failed mis­erably. Players he left out didn’t show up for training, feigning injury. Others complained to the media about his alleged incompetence.

So is he the right man for Scotland? He will pick the best team, put players in the positions they are best suited to and focus them on the strengths and weak­nesses of their opponents. If that’s enough, great. If it’s more you want, Berti’s a big risk. Oh, and one more thing: Vogts is very bad at losing gracefully. After the 3-0 defeat by Croatia in 1998  he moaned: “Ob­viously, someone didn’t want Ger­many to be successful.” So please, Scotland, don’t put him in too many situations like this.

From WSC 181 March 2002. What was happening this month

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