Bundesliga
Wolfsburg in the relegation battle: Hasenhüttl replaces Kovac
VfL Wolfsburg and coach Niko Kovac are going their separate ways. photo
© Swen Pförtner/dpa
Playing for the title, achieving a place in the European Cup: Those were the goals when Niko Kovac came to Wolfsburg. But the reality is: relegation battle. That’s why he is replaced by Ralph Hasenhüttl.
Survived five and a half months Niko Kovac has one sporting setback after another. When the VfL Wolfsburg coach still had to leave, only a few hours passed before the successor was presented.
The club announced the signing of Ralph Hasenhüttl late in the afternoon. The 56-year-old Austrian has already worked for RB Leipzig and FC Ingolstadt in the Bundesliga and most recently coached FC Southampton in the English Premier League from 2018 to 2022. According to VfL, he signed a “long-term contract”.
Only two wins in the last 20 league games
What awaits Hasenhüttl in Wolfsburg hardly anyone would have thought possible almost two years ago. At that time, Kovac joined the Volkswagen Club with the aim of playing for a title or at least a place in a European Cup competition. 20 months later, he handed over a team that had been strengthened for more than 70 million euros and was now a candidate for relegation. The 1:3 against FC Augsburg on Saturday was the eleventh game without a win in a row.
“We regret the development and believe it is necessary to give the team a new impetus now in order to stabilize the situation,” said managing director Marcel Schäfer about the coaching change. He and the VW-dominated supervisory board actually wanted to end this season with Kovac and not start the new beginning with Hasenhüttl until the summer. But the power of fact became too strong after the Augsburg game.
VfL has only won two of the last 20 league games and is still without a win in the entire 2024 calendar year. The lead over the relegation place shrank to six points on this 26th matchday. What is bitter for Kovac is that the defeat against Augsburg was facilitated by a completely excessive sending off when the score was 1-0 for Wolfsburg. But even that was no longer seen as a mitigating circumstance in view of months of undesirable developments.
“Of course, as head coach, I am particularly disappointed that we were unable to achieve a turnaround despite promising approaches,” Kovac was quoted as saying in a statement from the club on Sunday. In his last public appearance as VfL coach, the evening before after the Augsburg game, he once again fought for his job with emotion and passion. His team? “She’ll stay in the league!” His qualities as a coach? He doesn’t doubt that!
Kovac: Team better than the number of points shows
Kovac is not the first well-known coach to miss high goals in Wolfsburg. This also happened to Mark van Bommel, Andries Jonker and the former English national coach Steve McClaren before him. But for the 52-year-old, the discrepancy between what was expected and what was achieved was particularly large.
When Kovac came to VfL in 2022, he was also considered a potential Premier League coach, having previously driven the enormous development of Eintracht Frankfurt, won the double with Bayern Munich and led the French club AS Monaco into Champions League qualification. But no matter what he did in Wolfsburg, it quickly reached its limits.
He taught his team fitness and running strength – but nothing more. He rhetorically reduced the long series of failures to the factors of luck and bad luck. It is Kovac’s greatest achievement in Wolfsburg that he has developed hitherto little-known players such as Felix Nmecha and Micky van de Ven to such an extent that VfL sold them for 70 million euros last summer. In the end, that didn’t outweigh the lack of further development in the game. This team is “much better than the number of points shows,” said Kovac on Saturday. Ralph Hasenhüttl now has to prove this.