Day 1 - Welcome to Sandhausen

My name is Matthew Williams, a 25 year old from Swansea and I am a football manager. My short playing career was ended when I took a scissor kick to the knee while playing for Neath AFC that caused serious cartilage damage from which I couldn’t recover. There wasn’t a club in England that would hire a young, inexperienced manager. I applied for various jobs around the lower leagues in Europe, but alas, no-one wanted to know. That was, until I came across SV Sandhausen of the German Third Division.

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Day 1 – Welcome to Sandhausen

I was welcomed to the club by the chairman, Juergen Machmeier, whose first words were to tell me to ignore the media’s claims that I was too inexperienced for the job that he had so kindly offered me. We had a lengthy chat about the history of the club and then he stated his expectations for the coming season – to achieve a top-half finish within the Third Division. I agreed that this would be a sensible and achievable target for my first season in management and I signed my contract there and then. Herr Machmeier added that the backroom staff had been kept on from the previous regime of manager Gerd Dais, but that they had agreed to terminate their contracts if I wanted to bring in any of my own staff. I thought that I should visit the staff, and see if they had any ideas fot the club that they’d want to talk to me about. The first office I came across was that of my Assistant Manager, Thorsten Damm.

Thorsten is a mountain of a man. He told me that he was a central defender in his playing days and I could see the type of player and man that he was from the way that he held himself, strong and unwavering. He said that he looked forward to forging a strong working relationship with me, and I responded in kind. He then proceeded to show me around the Hardtwaldstadion, introducing me to the rest of the coaching staff. For the most part, I’m happy with the current set up. The biggest problem I could find was that not a single member of the backroom staff can speak English, and I can’t speak German, which means that everything has to be said through a translator. This is a problem, of course, that can hopefully be rectified over time, with a great deal of effort on my part.

The coaching staff and myself sat in the conference room to talk about the club’s direction, they all had advice about which players would be best suited to taking throw-ins, free kicks and penalties, advice which I gladly took on board. We then had a chat about formations, and we settled on initially using a 4-4-2 diamond to use in our first training session tomorrow. The meeting was closed with Thorsten informing me that sadly, the youth facilities at Sandhausen were pretty poor and because of this, we had no youth prospects to look at bringing on this season. This is something that I hope to rectify during my tenure here.

As I was about to leave for the day, Thorsten gave me an inch-thick folder labelled “Vereinmelden”. This, he explained, was the coaches’ combined knowledge of our players, their strengths and weaknesses, and squad depth in certain positions. I told him that this would make excellent bedtime reading. I’m not sure if the sarcasm made it through the translation.

So, as I lay here now in my hotel room, between looking through estate agents’ brochures for an apartment, learning about the team that I have inherited and writing an advertisement for a full-time German teacher, I can look forward to getting down to business tomorrow.