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Backroom Staff

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RedStar

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Gary Mac and O'Driscoll gone according to the guardian. Klopp is bringing in his own team. Ljinders will stay though.

Anybody know anything about the team Klopp works with?
 
What I read he brings a Bosnian called Buvac, which he normally referes to as the brain. Played With him in Mainz, and when Klopp took over Mainz he brought him in to the backroom staff. They are like an old pair when it comes to working together. Klopp being the boss, outspoken and charismatic, and Buvac the thinker, operating quitely in the back. i don't know if you saw any of the videos of Klopps celebration, but there is a darkhaired (little long hair) smaller guy allways present in the background and I believe that is him.

Peter krawietz is a analyst who was With Dortmund through the Klopp period (not sure about Mainz). Sounds like a real computer nerd as he already during halftime show the team a brief analyze of the first half and were they went wrong mostly. Never played himself as far as I understood.

There isa physical trainer in the team which I don't know to much about, but I read somewhere that Mainz went for a week long survival trip in Sweden. Don't know if it is the same guy. Wouldnt suit the Spice boys I assume so good we have moved on from that!
 
[article=Liverpool echo]The 54-year-old experienced Bosnian coach has had a close bond with Klopp since they were team-mates together at Mainz more than two decades ago.

Buvac was an attacking midfielder who had spells with Rudar Ljubija and Banja Luka in his homeland before moving to Germany in 1991, He played for Rot-Weiss Erfurt and then spent three years at Mainz before signing for Neukirchen,

He hung up his boots at the age of 36 and was appointed manager of the club who were operating at the time in the fourth tier of German football.

In 2001 Klopp came calling. Klopp had been offered the manager’s job at Mainz after deciding to retire from playing and he wanted Buvac alongside him.

It was the start of a successful double act. Over the next seven years they secured promotion for Mainz into the Bundesliga for the first time and earned European qualification.

In 2007 Mainz were relegated and 12 months later, after failing to get them back up, they walked away.

Borussia Dortmund made their move and in May 2008 Klopp and Buvac inherited a team who had finished 13th under Thomas Doll.

After sixth and fifth placed finishes, Dortmund kicked on and won back to back Bundesliga titles in thrilling fashion.

Buvac the 'co-architect'

Buvac was the co-architect of Dortmund’s high-octane style of play where everything was done at speed - they pressed relentlessly to win back possession and counter-attacked with pace and movement.

The 2012 victory over Bayern Munich in the German Cup final sealed the club’s first ever domestic double.

The following season they lit up the Champions League - knocking out Real Madrid en route to the final where Bayern got their revenge with a 2-1 win at Wembley.

Hampered by the sale of Robert Lewandowski to their rivals, last term standards slipped. At one stage Dortmund were flirting with relegation before a spirited revival saw them finish seventh. Klopp announced back in April that he would be leaving to take a sabbatical and Buvac went with him.

Klopp has previously described Buvac as his “brains” and someone he has a telepathic relationship with. The respect between the two men is clear.

Back in September 2013 Klopp was hit with a touchline ban after being sent off against Napoli in the Champions League for berating the fourth official.

Asked about the manager’s absence at the time, Dortmund midfielder Nuri Şahin, who had a short loan spell at Liverpool the previous season, said: “Zeljko Buvac is basically Klopp’s twin, and he’ll be on the bench. “Both of them see football in exactly the same way.”

Now the duo are now set to be reunited at Anfield where Kopites will hope they can replicate the glory they brought to the Westfalenstadion.

[/article]
 
Actherberg must have number on Ian Ayre..

How he is still at the club with the state of our goalkeeper from time to time is beyond me..
 
Wolfgang de Beer is still employed at Dortmund. Klopp will probably be searching for a new gk coach.
 
Head of opposition analysis out on his arse too, among others. Night of the long knives. Good to see.
 
2D34546A00000578-0-image-a-76_1444315522175.jpg

[article=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3265091/Jurgen-Klopp-plans-reunited-old-friendships-Liverpool-FC-David-Wagner-set-backroom-staff.html#ixzz3nzNFV0AG ]Jurgen Klopp wants Borussia Dortmund's reserve team manager David Wagner, the former USA international, to join his Liverpool staff, Sportsmail understands.

The pair formed a friendship playing alongside each other at Mainz between 1991 to 1995 and were reunited at Dortmund when Wagner took charge of the club's Under-21 side in July 2011.

Klopp is looking to shape his own backroom team at Liverpool, with Peter Krawietz, his assistant at the Wesfalenstadion, and Zeljko Buvac, another established associate, moving to Anfield.

Liverpool assistants Gary McAllister and Sean O'Driscoll, appointed in the summer, will leave the club, so too Chris Davies, head of opposition analysis, and Glen Driscoll, head of performance.

Wagner, 43, has enjoyed success with Dortmund's second team, earning promotion to the third tier of German football in his first campaign, before maintaining their status for two seasons and reaching a record-high finish of 14th.

Relegation followed last season but his youth development and coaching skills are highly valued by Klopp, who promoted Erik Durm, the 23-year-old full-back and Germany international, and Jonas Hofmann, the 23-year-old winger, to his first team squad from Wagner's team in recent years.

Marian Sarr, a 20-year-old defender, and Marvin Ducksch, a 21-year-old striker, have also made appearances for the senior side.

Wagner had a nomadic playing career, appearing for eight clubs including Schalke. He played for Germany at Under-18 and Under-21 levels but switched to the USA in 1996 by virtue of having an American father and won eight caps.[/article]

[article=https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/can-an-american-help-save-german-soccers-troubled-super-club]There are times in life when the immediate future seems knowable, like we're traveling down a well-lit path. You start college, say, or you get a job—you allow yourself to plan. But then the inevitable moment comes when that path takes an unforeseen turn. Maybe you're laid off. Maybe you're injured. Or maybe the change is positive: you meet someone, or an old friend gives you life-altering advice. David Wagner—one of just five professional American coaches in European soccer—had one such moment in 2005, when chatting with Jurgen Klopp.

Wagner, whose dad is American but has spent almost his entire life in Germany, hung up his cleats in 2002, after a long playing career in Germany's top two divisions. "After nearly 11 years, it was enough," he says. With Schalke, Wagner won the UEFA Cup in 1997. He made eight appearances with the U.S. national team and almost went to the 1998 World Cup, only for Eric Wynalda, the first choice striker back then, to recover from injury in time for the tournament.

"So I thought, I played football in the whole world. I saw everything. It was good, thank you." Wagner claps his hands together as though knocking off dust. "[Time to] try to start something new."

That something new was teaching. At a university in Darmstadt, a city just south of Frankfurt, he double majored in biology and sports science and earned his teaching credential. On the side, he dusted off his cleats and played a little ball, turning out for a fifth division club in nearby Weinheim. There, he and his wife bought a home and had their second child. His future was set.

Then Klopp came around.

Klopp and Wagner were roommates for four years in the early 1990s, when they both played for Mainz. They'd been close friends ever since. Wagner was even the best man at Klopp's wedding. By 2005, Klopp was head coach of Mainz and had just succeeded in getting the team promoted to the Bundesliga.

That year, Wagner had begun "feeling this fire" to return to the sport professionally, and he sought advice from "Kloppo," as he refers to his friend. Klopp encouraged him to leave teaching, move into coaching, and apply for his UEFA Pro License. The Pro License is the highest-level coaching certificate offered in Europe, and today it's required for head coaches in the top three German divisions. Klopp received his that year. With Wagner's academic background and teaching credential, Klopp thought he'd have a unique and attractive resume.

"You played as a professional. Now you studied [two subjects]," Wagner remembers Klopp telling him. "And when you have the Pro License, please give me one name who has all these four things. Give me one coach's name with these four things."

They both thought about it, and, in the end, they came up with one, but only one—a coach who'd studied math. Two years later, Wagner had his Pro License and his first job with a Bundesliga team, as the U17 coach at Hoffenheim.

"Normally a player, after his playing career, tries to come into this soccer business directly," says Wagner. "And, for me, I think [my time off] was very important because in sports science and also biology I have parts that I can use now in my job. I can discuss with our physiotherapist and our doctor, with our athletic coach, I can discuss with him about the details that a head coach [normally] wouldn't be able to discuss, because he doesn't know science and biology. So I know everything that happens in your body when you run 1,000 meters. So this is an advantage for me."

Klopp moved to Dortmund in 2008, and set about rebuilding BVB into a European superclub. In 2011, the head coach position for Dortmund's second team, Dortmund II, opened up.

One guess whom Klopp called for the job.

"It's a difficult period at the club," is the first thing Wagner says after offering me a cup of coffee in Dortmund's break room, which has a little kitchen and tables that overlook the training fields at the club's training complex in Brackel, a small town just east of Dortmund's city center. The complex, built in 2006, consists of a half dozen fields centered around a rectangular, two-story building sided with dark wooden paneling and pillars painted BVB's famous electric yellow. The youth teams, second team, and professional squad all train there.

Wagner is fresh from a first team practice. Wearing a dark grey, yellow-highlighted track suit, he could be mistaken for a player himself if not for the grey in his short-cropped beard. He speaks fluid-if-heavily-accented English, smacking on gum and occasionally slipping in a German word if the English equivalent is close (e.g. two thousand elf rather than two thousand eleven).

"A difficult period" is a serious understatement. Just the day before, Dortmund had lost to Augsburg, which meant that, as of my meeting with Wagner, the club was in last place in the Bundesliga. (It has since won twice and is in 15th place out of 18 teams.)

Wagner, Klopp, and the rest of the Dortmund brain trust were trying to figure out how to get the team moving back up the league table. In a couple of hours, Klopp would hold a press conference just down the hall where he wouldn't field softballs about how he got the team to play so well—which is how the majority of his press conferences have gone over the last few seasons, with two Bundesliga titles and one trip to the Champions League final—but rather about whether he was still fit for the job.

That he and Klopp are so close is something Wagner says makes for a unique club structure, one that is a huge advantage for Dortmund. It means the philosophy put forward by Klopp with the first team is implemented seamlessly with the second team. But it goes beyond that. It's not uncommon for Klopp to join Wagner at his training sessions, and vice versa, and the two are constantly exchanging ideas. The first and second teams might play in different divisions, but at Dortmund they can seem almost like one big team, with the two head coaches side-by-side.

The two, however, are judged very differently. Wagner's job doesn't hinge on Bundesliga success. Dortmund II plays in the third division, but Wagner's job isn't tied to success there either. Not entirely, anyway.

Wagner describes his role at Dortmund like this: "First is to develop players, hopefully for our first team. The second thing is, yeah, to make the club richer, [to] develop players we can loan or sell to clubs. And the third thing is to hold the team in the third division."

As if that weren't enough to juggle, a recent rule change by the German Federation has removed a bit of Wagner's job security. The Federation has traditionally required professional clubs to field second teams—teams made up of players under the age of twenty three, with three over-age exceptions—but this summer, that requirement was lifted. Some clubs have done away with their second teams altogether, meaning their structure jumps from the U19 squad right to the first team.

"Each club has its own philosophy," says Wagner. "We are sure that the players can develop between 20 and [23]. We have enough examples of players who develop [during that period.] This is why we have this team, to hold these players in this club, give these players your philosophy, and try to develop these players. Other clubs think, 'Okay, maybe they develop better when we loan him to another club and we can bring him back.' But we are sure this is the right way."

And while BVB may no longer be required to keep Wagner's team around, his history of meeting all three of his stated goals, year after year, has made him indispensable.

Training players for the first team? Sure. Consider Erik Durm. In 2012, Durm was a promising forward on Mainz's second team. He scored enough goals in the regional division in which Mainz then played to capture Wagner's attention, and Durm signed for Dortmund II that summer. The next season, he played 28 times under Wagner, in the third division, but only scored twice. His low scoring wasn't due to a lack of skill in the face of tougher competition, it was because Wagner, citing Durm's strong positional awareness and speed, played him as a winger. That offseason, Klopp and Wagner discussed using him as an outside defender, and that's where he played with the first team during the 2013-2014 season. He did so well as a first team defender that he went to Brazil that summer with the national team.

In two years, thanks to Wagner, Dortmund II, and a little third division experimentation, Durm went from playing as a forward in a regional league to winning the World Cup as a defender.

As for Wagner's record selling and loaning players to other clubs, Terrence Boyd is one of many examples. Dortmund bought Boyd for an estimated 100,000 Euros in 2011 and sold him to Rapid Wienna one year later for twice that. Jonas Hofmann, a player who's been between Dortmund's two teams for a couple years, is another. Hofmann is in the midst of a successful loan at Mainz.

And Wagner's record in the league? In his first season at Dortmund, the team won promotion to the third division. It's always close, but he's avoided relegation ever since. This season, only three Bundesliga clubs have second teams in the third division, the highest in which second teams are eligible to play. The difference in quality between the nationwide third division and the regional fourth divisions is considerable. Wagner says that in regional league games, players like his only need to play at about 80 percent to win, which is the kind of effort that would get the team bounced from the third division. "It's a very hard fight to stay in this league, because we always play against very tough, old players who know this game very well," says Wagner.

The number of spectators in the third division also adds to the pressure, which is favorable for development: "The atmosphere is completely different. Normally, in the regionalliga, there are 500, sometimes 1,000 [spectators]. In the 3rd division, we play against Dynamo Dresden: 25,000. So from 25,000 [in the third division] to 50,000 [in the Bundesliga] is not so far away. So it is very important that we are in this league, in my opinion."

Wagner's record in the third division is all the more impressive when you consider that his team isn't just under threat of losing its star players, as are most third division teams; his team's best players are guaranteed to leave the club at the end of every season—and if they get promoted to the first team, sometimes they leave right in the middle. It's counterintuitive, but he wants them to leave. Finding new players and then developing them are the priorities, and the more players he successfully moves through, the better.

"We are able to search in the whole world to find them," he says. "To find them cheap, to bring them to our first team." It's his favorite part of the job.

If he wanted to, Wagner could easily move somewhere and manage a first team. Plenty of head coaches have moved into upper-league management after a spell in the third division. He has the credentials, but that's not the future he sees for himself. Not now, anyway.

"One special point for me is I never had a future plan," he says. "I always tried to do something that makes me satisfied, and this is what I do here. For me, at the moment, this job here makes me satisfied, 100 percent. So I am happy and everything is good."

In other words, Wagner has learned to embrace an unknowable future, and the inherent insecurity of soccer. He left teaching—perhaps the most secure career in Germany, a job from which it's almost impossible to get fired—for a job in what is probably the country's most insecure field. He's loving it.

"Of course," he continues, perhaps thinking back to last night's loss to Augsburg, "in the past, we always stayed on the sunny side. In the last year, we lost the sunny side. It's a little bit—"

He thinks for a beat. Chews his gum.

"—Yeah. Not so easy at the moment. But this is also our job, to accept this period and work on it."[/article]
 
I feel sorry for O'Driscoll getting dragged into this mess by Rodgers. he seemingly had a good job at the FA only to now find himself out on his arse.

Fair play to Gary Mac too for taking it on the chin
 
Gary Mac has taken an ambassadorial role for the club.

We should be looking to get John Barnes on a similar gig. He's so eloquent, sensible and still one of us.

Problem with Digger is that he's really been stung by his managerial failures. Listen to his interviews, he defends other failing managers but he's really defending himself. He's a bright and ambitious guy but he's really screwed up by what happened to him. It would be great to have him back at the club but he needs to get over the bitterness. At the moment everything seems to be regarded with cynicism by him.
 
2D34546A00000578-0-image-a-76_1444315522175.jpg

[article=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3265091/Jurgen-Klopp-plans-reunited-old-friendships-Liverpool-FC-David-Wagner-set-backroom-staff.html#ixzz3nzNFV0AG ]Jurgen Klopp wants Borussia Dortmund's reserve team manager David Wagner, the former USA international, to join his Liverpool staff, Sportsmail understands.

The pair formed a friendship playing alongside each other at Mainz between 1991 to 1995 and were reunited at Dortmund when Wagner took charge of the club's Under-21 side in July 2011.

Klopp is looking to shape his own backroom team at Liverpool, with Peter Krawietz, his assistant at the Wesfalenstadion, and Zeljko Buvac, another established associate, moving to Anfield.

Liverpool assistants Gary McAllister and Sean O'Driscoll, appointed in the summer, will leave the club, so too Chris Davies, head of opposition analysis, and Glen Driscoll, head of performance.

Wagner, 43, has enjoyed success with Dortmund's second team, earning promotion to the third tier of German football in his first campaign, before maintaining their status for two seasons and reaching a record-high finish of 14th.

Relegation followed last season but his youth development and coaching skills are highly valued by Klopp, who promoted Erik Durm, the 23-year-old full-back and Germany international, and Jonas Hofmann, the 23-year-old winger, to his first team squad from Wagner's team in recent years.

Marian Sarr, a 20-year-old defender, and Marvin Ducksch, a 21-year-old striker, have also made appearances for the senior side.

Wagner had a nomadic playing career, appearing for eight clubs including Schalke. He played for Germany at Under-18 and Under-21 levels but switched to the USA in 1996 by virtue of having an American father and won eight caps.[/article]

[article=https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/can-an-american-help-save-german-soccers-troubled-super-club]There are times in life when the immediate future seems knowable, like we're traveling down a well-lit path. You start college, say, or you get a job—you allow yourself to plan. But then the inevitable moment comes when that path takes an unforeseen turn. Maybe you're laid off. Maybe you're injured. Or maybe the change is positive: you meet someone, or an old friend gives you life-altering advice. David Wagner—one of just five professional American coaches in European soccer—had one such moment in 2005, when chatting with Jurgen Klopp.

Wagner, whose dad is American but has spent almost his entire life in Germany, hung up his cleats in 2002, after a long playing career in Germany's top two divisions. "After nearly 11 years, it was enough," he says. With Schalke, Wagner won the UEFA Cup in 1997. He made eight appearances with the U.S. national team and almost went to the 1998 World Cup, only for Eric Wynalda, the first choice striker back then, to recover from injury in time for the tournament.

"So I thought, I played football in the whole world. I saw everything. It was good, thank you." Wagner claps his hands together as though knocking off dust. "[Time to] try to start something new."

That something new was teaching. At a university in Darmstadt, a city just south of Frankfurt, he double majored in biology and sports science and earned his teaching credential. On the side, he dusted off his cleats and played a little ball, turning out for a fifth division club in nearby Weinheim. There, he and his wife bought a home and had their second child. His future was set.

Then Klopp came around.

Klopp and Wagner were roommates for four years in the early 1990s, when they both played for Mainz. They'd been close friends ever since. Wagner was even the best man at Klopp's wedding. By 2005, Klopp was head coach of Mainz and had just succeeded in getting the team promoted to the Bundesliga.

That year, Wagner had begun "feeling this fire" to return to the sport professionally, and he sought advice from "Kloppo," as he refers to his friend. Klopp encouraged him to leave teaching, move into coaching, and apply for his UEFA Pro License. The Pro License is the highest-level coaching certificate offered in Europe, and today it's required for head coaches in the top three German divisions. Klopp received his that year. With Wagner's academic background and teaching credential, Klopp thought he'd have a unique and attractive resume.

"You played as a professional. Now you studied [two subjects]," Wagner remembers Klopp telling him. "And when you have the Pro License, please give me one name who has all these four things. Give me one coach's name with these four things."

They both thought about it, and, in the end, they came up with one, but only one—a coach who'd studied math. Two years later, Wagner had his Pro License and his first job with a Bundesliga team, as the U17 coach at Hoffenheim.

"Normally a player, after his playing career, tries to come into this soccer business directly," says Wagner. "And, for me, I think [my time off] was very important because in sports science and also biology I have parts that I can use now in my job. I can discuss with our physiotherapist and our doctor, with our athletic coach, I can discuss with him about the details that a head coach [normally] wouldn't be able to discuss, because he doesn't know science and biology. So I know everything that happens in your body when you run 1,000 meters. So this is an advantage for me."

Klopp moved to Dortmund in 2008, and set about rebuilding BVB into a European superclub. In 2011, the head coach position for Dortmund's second team, Dortmund II, opened up.

One guess whom Klopp called for the job.

"It's a difficult period at the club," is the first thing Wagner says after offering me a cup of coffee in Dortmund's break room, which has a little kitchen and tables that overlook the training fields at the club's training complex in Brackel, a small town just east of Dortmund's city center. The complex, built in 2006, consists of a half dozen fields centered around a rectangular, two-story building sided with dark wooden paneling and pillars painted BVB's famous electric yellow. The youth teams, second team, and professional squad all train there.

Wagner is fresh from a first team practice. Wearing a dark grey, yellow-highlighted track suit, he could be mistaken for a player himself if not for the grey in his short-cropped beard. He speaks fluid-if-heavily-accented English, smacking on gum and occasionally slipping in a German word if the English equivalent is close (e.g. two thousand elf rather than two thousand eleven).

"A difficult period" is a serious understatement. Just the day before, Dortmund had lost to Augsburg, which meant that, as of my meeting with Wagner, the club was in last place in the Bundesliga. (It has since won twice and is in 15th place out of 18 teams.)

Wagner, Klopp, and the rest of the Dortmund brain trust were trying to figure out how to get the team moving back up the league table. In a couple of hours, Klopp would hold a press conference just down the hall where he wouldn't field softballs about how he got the team to play so well—which is how the majority of his press conferences have gone over the last few seasons, with two Bundesliga titles and one trip to the Champions League final—but rather about whether he was still fit for the job.

That he and Klopp are so close is something Wagner says makes for a unique club structure, one that is a huge advantage for Dortmund. It means the philosophy put forward by Klopp with the first team is implemented seamlessly with the second team. But it goes beyond that. It's not uncommon for Klopp to join Wagner at his training sessions, and vice versa, and the two are constantly exchanging ideas. The first and second teams might play in different divisions, but at Dortmund they can seem almost like one big team, with the two head coaches side-by-side.

The two, however, are judged very differently. Wagner's job doesn't hinge on Bundesliga success. Dortmund II plays in the third division, but Wagner's job isn't tied to success there either. Not entirely, anyway.

Wagner describes his role at Dortmund like this: "First is to develop players, hopefully for our first team. The second thing is, yeah, to make the club richer, [to] develop players we can loan or sell to clubs. And the third thing is to hold the team in the third division."

As if that weren't enough to juggle, a recent rule change by the German Federation has removed a bit of Wagner's job security. The Federation has traditionally required professional clubs to field second teams—teams made up of players under the age of twenty three, with three over-age exceptions—but this summer, that requirement was lifted. Some clubs have done away with their second teams altogether, meaning their structure jumps from the U19 squad right to the first team.

"Each club has its own philosophy," says Wagner. "We are sure that the players can develop between 20 and [23]. We have enough examples of players who develop [during that period.] This is why we have this team, to hold these players in this club, give these players your philosophy, and try to develop these players. Other clubs think, 'Okay, maybe they develop better when we loan him to another club and we can bring him back.' But we are sure this is the right way."

And while BVB may no longer be required to keep Wagner's team around, his history of meeting all three of his stated goals, year after year, has made him indispensable.

Training players for the first team? Sure. Consider Erik Durm. In 2012, Durm was a promising forward on Mainz's second team. He scored enough goals in the regional division in which Mainz then played to capture Wagner's attention, and Durm signed for Dortmund II that summer. The next season, he played 28 times under Wagner, in the third division, but only scored twice. His low scoring wasn't due to a lack of skill in the face of tougher competition, it was because Wagner, citing Durm's strong positional awareness and speed, played him as a winger. That offseason, Klopp and Wagner discussed using him as an outside defender, and that's where he played with the first team during the 2013-2014 season. He did so well as a first team defender that he went to Brazil that summer with the national team.

In two years, thanks to Wagner, Dortmund II, and a little third division experimentation, Durm went from playing as a forward in a regional league to winning the World Cup as a defender.

As for Wagner's record selling and loaning players to other clubs, Terrence Boyd is one of many examples. Dortmund bought Boyd for an estimated 100,000 Euros in 2011 and sold him to Rapid Wienna one year later for twice that. Jonas Hofmann, a player who's been between Dortmund's two teams for a couple years, is another. Hofmann is in the midst of a successful loan at Mainz.

And Wagner's record in the league? In his first season at Dortmund, the team won promotion to the third division. It's always close, but he's avoided relegation ever since. This season, only three Bundesliga clubs have second teams in the third division, the highest in which second teams are eligible to play. The difference in quality between the nationwide third division and the regional fourth divisions is considerable. Wagner says that in regional league games, players like his only need to play at about 80 percent to win, which is the kind of effort that would get the team bounced from the third division. "It's a very hard fight to stay in this league, because we always play against very tough, old players who know this game very well," says Wagner.

The number of spectators in the third division also adds to the pressure, which is favorable for development: "The atmosphere is completely different. Normally, in the regionalliga, there are 500, sometimes 1,000 [spectators]. In the 3rd division, we play against Dynamo Dresden: 25,000. So from 25,000 [in the third division] to 50,000 [in the Bundesliga] is not so far away. So it is very important that we are in this league, in my opinion."

Wagner's record in the third division is all the more impressive when you consider that his team isn't just under threat of losing its star players, as are most third division teams; his team's best players are guaranteed to leave the club at the end of every season—and if they get promoted to the first team, sometimes they leave right in the middle. It's counterintuitive, but he wants them to leave. Finding new players and then developing them are the priorities, and the more players he successfully moves through, the better.

"We are able to search in the whole world to find them," he says. "To find them cheap, to bring them to our first team." It's his favorite part of the job.

If he wanted to, Wagner could easily move somewhere and manage a first team. Plenty of head coaches have moved into upper-league management after a spell in the third division. He has the credentials, but that's not the future he sees for himself. Not now, anyway.

"One special point for me is I never had a future plan," he says. "I always tried to do something that makes me satisfied, and this is what I do here. For me, at the moment, this job here makes me satisfied, 100 percent. So I am happy and everything is good."

In other words, Wagner has learned to embrace an unknowable future, and the inherent insecurity of soccer. He left teaching—perhaps the most secure career in Germany, a job from which it's almost impossible to get fired—for a job in what is probably the country's most insecure field. He's loving it.

"Of course," he continues, perhaps thinking back to last night's loss to Augsburg, "in the past, we always stayed on the sunny side. In the last year, we lost the sunny side. It's a little bit—"

He thinks for a beat. Chews his gum.

"—Yeah. Not so easy at the moment. But this is also our job, to accept this period and work on it."[/article]
http://www.bvb.de/News/U23/Borussia-Dortmund-und-David-Wagner-beenden-Zusammenarbeit

[article]Borussia Dortmund have parted company with under-23 coach David Wagner, who has been tipped to reunite with Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool.

Wagner joined Dortmund from Hoffenheim, where he had coached the under-19 side, in 2011.

He secured promotion to Germany's third tier in his first year at BVB, although the club's under-23s were relegated last season.

Following a 1-0 home defeat to TuS Erndtebruck at the weekend -- a result which leaves Dortmund's under-23s in the relegation zone -- Wagner's exit was confirmed.

"Borussia Dortmund are an extraordinary club with fantastic fans. In spite of that I seek a new sporting challenge after a great time at Dortmund," Wagner said in a Dortmund statement.

The statement added that Wagner had made the step "to enter contract negotiations" with other clubs.


When Klopp joined Liverpool in October, local media in Dortmund reported that Wagner could follow his old boss to Anfield.

Wagner was Klopp's best man at his wedding, while the Reds boss is the godfather of his former colleague's youngest daughter, with their friendship dating back to their days as players at Mainz.

Wagner told Dortmund fanzine schwatzgelb.de last month that he is not immediately joining Klopp's backroom staff at Liverpool, but did not rule out a future move.[/article]
 
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