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THE VIEW FROM THE STUTTGART END
Jens 1893
First off, I´d like to introduce myself. My name is Jens, I´m 24 years old and I have been a Stuttgart fan for 16 years and have had a season ticket since 1996. I used to go to just about every away game, until about a year ago when I became a bit disillusioned about the sport as a whole and the leadership of this club.
Stuttgart is a city in Southern Germany with about 600,000 inhabitants in the city itself and 2.5million in the metro area. It´s one of Germany´s most important business cities as some well known companies like Bosch, Porsche and Daimler Chrysler have their headquarters and major plants in the area. It also is the capital of the state Baden Württemberg.
The club may not be as well known as Bayern Munich or Dortmund, but we have been in the top flight for all but two years and are currently fourth in the Bundesliga´s “eternal standings” only behind Bayern, Hamburg and Werder Bremen. The club is currently run by Erwin Staudt, a Stuttgart fan since his childhood, who previously was the CEO of IBM Europe.
It all started off well for him in 2003 as he took the job when we had just qualifed for the Champions League for the first time in club history and he didn´t really have a hard job to do. The team was playing well, the stadium was full and the whole country was full of praise for “Die Jungen Wilden” (the wild youngsters). The club got that nickname as it just barely escaped relegation in 2001 and had some serious financial problems in the shape of a €15m debt.
Some players left and there was no money to replace them, so the club was forced into giving some youngsters a chance and it all turned out well. Players like Timo Hildebrand, Andreas Hinkel, Ioannis Amanatidis, Timo Wenzel, Kevin Kuranyi and Aliaksandr Hleb got their chance to shine and they didn´t disappoint. The club finished eighth in 2002 and qualified for the UEFA Cup via the Intertoto Cup, where we were beaten by eventual finalists Celtic in the fourth round.
The team progressed well, Hinkel, Kuranyi and Hildebrand even got their first caps and unexpectedly qualified for the Champions League in 2003, where they didn´t disappoint. We beat Manchester United (arguably one of the finest nights in the club's history) and lost to Chelsea in heartbreaking fashion in the second round.
The Bundesliga season also went well until a certain point. The club started the season off by going unbeaten in sixteen matches, but then struggled for a few weeks around the winter break, which eventually cost them the chance of winning the Bundesliga title. But as always with this club, things only go well for a certain period of time and then mistakes are made that destroy the good work of the previous years. It was no different this time.
The manager, Felix Magath, joined Bayern Munich at the end of the season under controversial circumstances and the team narrowly missed out on Champions League qualification on the last day of the season. Also Brazilian defender Marcelo Bordon, arguably the best Bundesliga defender that season and the backbone of a defence that only conceded 24 goals all season and set a new Bundesliga record for most consecutive minutes without a goal conceded, was allowed to leave to Schalke for €5m. Bordon already had an agreement to join Schalke on a free transfer in 2005, so the club decided to cash in rather than lose him for nothing.
Matthias Sammer became the new manager and Bordon was never properly replaced. The club brought in Markus Babbel from Liverpool, Martin Stranzl from 1860 Munich and Matthieu Delpierre from Lille and they all did their jobs well, but none could replace Bordon properly. The new season started well and Stuttgart were in the hunt for third place all season, but yet again missed out on the last day of the season. The summer of 2005 brought even more changes than the previous one. Sammer was fired at the end of the season as he´d lost control of the team, had no system or plan at all and as the team totally fell apart during the run in.
Schalke bought Kevin Kuranyi out of his contract for €7m and the midfield wizard, Aliaksandr Hleb, joined Arsenal for €15m. The money was there, Giovanni Trapattoni was brought in as the new coach and the club did a nice job in signing the Dane Jon Dahl Tomasson to replace Kevin Kuranyi, but replacing Hleb was totally forgotten and the team lacked flair and creativity in midfield.
The season so far has been very disappointing, to say the least, and many people blame Staudt for that. Staudt is a business man with no experience in football whatsoever and it shows. He also is very naïve and too much of a fan to do the job properly. Also Staudt has now hired two coaches that didn´t pan out and is seen as too tight by many. Some people, including me, say Staudt´s main focus is the business side of things and he somehow forgets that the most important part of a FOOTBALL CLUB is the product on the pitch, and that product has been disappointing so far.
Trapattoni´s lack of success led to his sacking a few days ago and many ran out of patience when the club hired Armin Veh as an interim coach. Veh has no experience at the top level and spent most of his coaching days with second and third division clubs. I think, or at least hope, he was brought in as a caretaker and the club is working on hiring a proper coach with a decent track record for the new season.
Anyway, on to the part that probably interests you most, the team you´ll be facing twice within the next week and a half. Our goalie is Timo Hildebrand, currently third in the pecking order for Germany behind Jens Lehmann and Oliver Kahn. Hildebrand is a top class goalie and many people think he should be in goal for the World Cup. We usually play with a flat back four that consists of Ludovic Magnin, Fernando Meira, Matthieu Delpierre and Andreas Hinkel.
Magnin is a Swiss “left back” who was brought in from Bremen last summer. You can´t fault the lad for trying, but he´s simply not good enough and a liability defensively. Delpierre and Meira are the centre halves. Delpierre is a young lad from France that really progressed well until Trapattoni and Meira probably is our best player. He´s excellent on the ball and many people wonder if he isn´t a better midfielder, but he probably is way too valuable as a centre half for now. He did play in midfield in our loss against Bielefeld on Saturday, but didn´t really set the world alight. Hinkel is a German international right back and one of the “Jungen Wilden”, but he´s struggled for a while now, although he did show some promise recently.
On to the midfield, or the so-called midfield in this case. Zvonimir Soldo, the Croatian club captain has been with the club for ten years but he´s 38 and he´s showing his age. He´s very influential and the leader of the team, but hardly does anything going forward and handicaps us there. Then there´s young Christian Gentner, a youth team product and the only midfielder with any kind of flair or creativity. He´s only twenty and is in his first season as a pro, but he´s quite promising. Other midfielders include Jesper Grönkjaer and Thomas Hitzlsperger, who you probably know well from their Premiership days, Christian Tiffert (the less said about this player the better) and Silvio Meissner.
The strikers are Jon Dahl Tomasson, a guy every football fan probably knows, Danijel Ljuboja, who was signed on loan from Paris SG and is our Uefa Cup top scorer, and young Mario Gomez, a youth team product like Gentner, who is in his first season as a pro. It´s hard to predict the lineup that´s gonna play on Thursday with the new coach and so on. On Saturday in Bielefeld I think the team decided who was going to play and it failed.
Right now, I don´t really care about Thursday as the most important thing right now is the long term future of the club and for that, the board has to go. From what I heard from the Boro fans on the board your team seems to be quite similar to ours, so I don´t think we´ll be in for two breathtaking matches, but rather for two bore fests in which away goals could very well be the deciding factor.
NO CLUE – NO PLAN – NO CONCEPT
SACK THE BOARD!
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