Magath will not be the coach of SpVgg Unterhaching

Felix Magath is a visitor to the sports park every now and then and watches SpVgg Unterhaching games in the third football league, especially when Alexander Leuthard is playing. The 18-year-old left winger is Werner Leuthard’s nephew. He, in turn, worked as Magath’s fitness coach for many years, in VfL Wolfsburg’s championship year in 2009 as well as in 2022, when the two Hertha BSC tormented themselves over relegation to stay in the Bundesliga. Everyone knows each other in football Bavaria, and when it became clear to SpVgg President Manfred Schwabl that he might need a new coach again, the idea was literally quite obvious to ask the most well-known available coach, if he already had one is a regular guest.

According to SZ information, negotiations took place over several days, and Schwabl is said to have been quite optimistic about being able to sign the 71-year-old. But now Magath has canceled, like he did first Bild newspaper reported; According to reports, this is also because the probability of being able to save the bottom of the third division, Unterhaching, like Hertha did, is much lower. Haching’s financial woes also offer no prospects for sustainable squad improvement. It will therefore be very difficult to save the team from returning to amateur football.

When the negotiations became known, many fans asked themselves: Why Magath? Because it may not fit together: that a club whose main source of income is the sale of its own talent is now bringing in an old-school coach; especially since the people of Haching have also made it their mission to want to train young trainers. The so-called “Hachinger Weg” would therefore be a trail for a veteran like Magath that he doesn’t even know where it leads. But on the one hand, Schwabl has a soft spot for experienced ex-professionals; Arie van Lent and Christian Ziege were previously trainers in Unterhaching.

In addition, Schwabl did not want to hire an alibi licensed trainer in order to be able to continue working with the unlicensed Sven Bender. “That would be a deception,” says Schwabl. The 58-year-old was difficult to reach on Monday. According to his own statements, he had a lot of conversations and was obviously looking again after Magath’s rejection. Schwabl said he was “in discussions in various directions.”

The Christmas season is also considered sacred in the football industry. However, there is much to suggest that Schwabl approached Magath before or around Christmas after he found out from the German Football Association that the club would be severely sanctioned if Bender remained head coach. The 71-year-old Magath took a few days to cancel, and that puts Schwabl in trouble because training starts again at the end of the week. On Sunday, Schwabl said that a trainer would be found by then. On January 18th, the Vorstädter start the second half of the season with a home game against eleventh-placed Borussia Dortmund II, and the penultimate VfL Osnabrück travels at the beginning of February – if the team still wants to have a chance of staying in the league, victories in these games are essential.