Quartet of hope: The new faces pulling the strings at Werder Bremen

Saturday night’s Nordderby between Werder Bremen and Hamburg will be historic, although it won’t be writing a version of history that either club will be keen to remember.

It will be the first time they’ve ever crossed paths in Bundesliga 2 and the first time they’ve met outside of Germany’s top-flight since their meeting in the UEFA Cup in 2009.

While Hamburg are playing their fourth season in the second division since their first-ever relegation in 2018, the feeling is still new for Werder Bremen. A mainstay in the Bundesliga since 1981, Bremen succumbed to relegation last season – but the writing had been on the wall.

“I wasn’t shocked by Bremen’s relegation because they were on the verge for a few seasons before, so it was coming,” former Werder Bremen defender Mikael Silvestre told DW.

“I think everyone had that feeling including the fans, but you always have that hope you can save yourselves, unfortunately that didn’t happen.”

Mikael SIlvestre played 27 times for Werder Bremen between 2010 and 2012.

A perfect storm

Shortly before their relegation, Werder splashed out on players they couldn’t really afford. The pandemic also set in, eating into the club’s matchday revenues and coach Florian Kohfeldt, while loved by huge sections of the club’s support, simply couldn’t stop the rot when results started to slide early this year — a perfect storm of misery.

“In 2020, the club did something they never did before, they took a huge financial risk. They added players like Leon Bittencourt and Ömer Toprak to the roster who were expensive, and while I was happy the club signed them, it was a huge financial risk that didn’t pay off,” Kirstie Sander, one of the heads of Werder Bremen’s umbrella fan club association, told DW.

The club gambled in 2019 that by the summer 2020 transfer window, they’d be able to offload players and balance the books. But the pandemic came knocking and clubs weren’t buying players – Bremen found themselves in financial trouble.

The club’s sporting director Frank Baumann has been open with fans about the decisions made in the past couple of years and has largely retained the backing of supporters, but it’s the missteps of Kohfeldt that proved fatal.

Large outlay: Leon Bittencourt und Ömer Toprak cost Bremen €7million and €4million, respectively.

“The chairman Marco Bode and sometimes Frank Baumann meet with myself and other fan groups a few times a year and are always very open with us, and we appreciate that. They will openly say ‘look, the decision I made here was bad, I’m sorry, and we learned from it,'” Sander says.

“Overall, Kohfeldt is a really nice guy and I still think he’s a really good coach, we started losing in February or March and couldn’t win again. That’s ultimately why we went down, even if there was only three points in it at the end. It was a shame but the fans basically supported the decision to get rid of him.”

Green shoots of recovery

Getting rid of a coach whose association with the club stretched back some 20 years was not the only tough decision the club made this year.

Recognizing their previous mistakes, Bremen elected four new members to the club’s Supervisory Board, all of whom bring specific experience to the table. The four new board members – Harm Ohlmeyer, Ulrike Hiller, Dirk Wintermann and Dr. Florian Weiß replace Marco Bode, Andreas Hoetzel, Thomas Krohne and Kurt Zech, all of whom did not stand for re-election.

They will start their work in October, and among them is Hiller, pictured below, who becomes the first woman elected to Bremen’s board. When she took to the podium at Bremen’s recent AGM, she raised a laugh: “You are now experiencing a completely different tone, because after five and a half hours the first woman is speaking.”

The four new faces on the Werder Bremen board.

A different tone is exactly what Bremen needs at this point. Hiller, 56, has been involved in Bremen politics for many years and has worked as a lawyer and mediator, and admits she is no football expert. But she hopes to bring more women into the fold as the club moves forward.

“The club is very good at listening and reacting positively to women’s issues, but representation matters and Ulrike Hiller’s presence on the board might help shine a light on the female perspective of fans,” Sander says.

Then there is Ohlmeyer, who will take on a similar role at Bremen as he had for many years at adidas, overseeing financial decisions. Wintermann will represent fan interests and Weiß, the youngest of the four at 43, comes in as a digital and strategy expert.

Bremen have started the season well, with three wins and just one defeat from their opening six games. They may be in Bundesliga 2 for the first time since 1981, but unlike fellow-heavyweights Schalke and Hamburg, who also languish in the second tier, it feels as though Bremen at least have a plan.

Article source: https://www.dw.com/en/quartet-of-hope-the-new-faces-pulling-the-strings-at-werder-bremen/a-59211517?maca=en-rss-en-sports-1027-xml-atom