Fellow Contenders To Succeed Flick And Guide Germany Into Euro 2024

With Hansi Flick gone just nine months ahead of Euro 2024, Germany are managerless before hosting a major men’s international tournament for the first time in 18 years, Reelradio.com.ng reports. Who will take over and what will the German national team look like when next summer comes around?

Julian Nagelsmann

His roots with his Hoffenheim — his first station in senior football — who he transformed almost overnight by making them, first and foremost, organised and tough to beat. As time went on they improved in the 3-1-4-2 formation that could suit Germany enormously. The national team right now has similar profiles and the formation and intense approach adopted by that Hoffenheim side would mask the issues of not having out-and-out-wingers and struggling to solve the issue of most of the wide defenders in the back four being centre-backs or players more adept at playing in a back five with freedom to attack. Of course, there would be multiple options in every position, but it’s easy to see how a Nagelsmann-coached Germany side would line up if he employed that shape from those Hoffenheim (and sometimes RB Leipzig) days. You have to work with what you have at international level and Nagelsmann is ideal for that task and has the system(s) to make up for some of the things Germany may be lacking.

Oliver Glasner

Another manager happy to use wingbacks, Glasner is currently out of work after his time at Eintracht Frankfurt ended this summer just one year after delivering Europa League success. Some of that success was built on the strong work of the club, with the foundations laid by the recruitment staff plus the work of Niko Kovač and then Adi Hütter, but Glasner also had success in making Wolfsburg a tough, organised team to beat. He led them to a fourth-place finish in the Bundesliga in 2019, before they finished 12th the following season as he moved to Frankfurt. There he won the Europa League (upsetting Barcelona as well as beating Real Betis and West Ham as Frankfurt went the entire campaign unbeaten) and led them to the DFB-Pokal final last season. The question is whether he could step up to manage the biggest of personalties but the appeal is obvious, especially if Nagelsmann is not interested.

Stefan Kuntz

The Euro 1996 winner followed the Gareth Southgate route into international management, albeit with a bit more success as he won the U21 Euros with Germany in 2017 and 2021, plus reached the final in 2019. Across those tournaments he managed the likes of Serge Gnabry, Karim Adeyemi, Florian Wirtz, David Raum, Nico Schlotterbeck, Jonathan Tah, Benjamin Henrichs and Ridle Baku (and later Armel Bell-Kotchap and Youssoufa Moukoko) who are all in with a shout of playing for the national team this summer. Upon leaving the position he took charge of Turkey, where the jury is still out but they look fairly good for Euro 2024 qualification as things stand and Kuntz has led them to 12 wins in 19 games in the dugout. It would be a bit left-field but not as left-field as….

Louis van Gaal

“As a rule I won’t train a club again, but a very promising country still has a chance of convincing me,” Van Gaal told Bild this week. Still, pretty unlikely that Germany will go for a 72-year-old Dutchman who had the Netherlands playing some fairly turgid football at the World Cup in the winter, right?

Matthias Sammer

The captain of the team that won the Euros in 1996, Sammer went on to claim the Ballon d’Or that year and then the Champions League with Borussia Dortmund a year later. As a manager, he led Dortmund to the Bundesliga title in 2002 and has has huge success slightly further away from the training pitch: in 2006 he was appointed the DFB’s technical director and worked closely with Joachim Löw as Germany competed at tournament after tournament. From there he did similarly well at Bayern Munich, where he is credited with masterminding the club’s treble win (and appointment of Pep Guardiola) from behind the scenes as he was employed in a role that saw him act as a go-between from the training pitch to the boardroom. More recently, the cancer survivor has been working as an advisor at Borussia Dortmund but the pull of the national team would surely be hard to resist if he is called upon? With a reputation for straight talking, no punches would be pulled with Sammer in charge.