When Werner Lorant once again appeared as an expert on the Bavarian Radio’s football program a few years ago, in 2017 at a TSV 1860 Munich game after forced relegation to the Bavarian Regional League, presenter Markus Othmer greeted him with the words: “I was impressed by his likeable charisma Nothing was lost for Werner Lorant.” Lorant looked rightly irritated, as it was never important to him to be likeable – quite the opposite. The former 1860 coach ultimately made sentences like: “I only make substitutions if someone breaks a leg” or “The players should run and keep their mouths shut.”
Werner Lorant today, at the beginning of November, in the Grünwalder Stadium.
(Photo: Mladen Lackovic/IMAGO)
Well, Lorant, who celebrated his 75th birthday on Tuesday, took the sweet mixed-breed dog Jackson from an animal shelter in Estepona, Spain, and walks him every day around Lake Waginger, where he lives. But otherwise, even in his old age, Lorant doesn’t care about coming across as overly likeable – but he is always authentic. His relationship with TSV 1860 can be described as schizophrenic, which puts him in good company with many Lions fans: on the one hand it is the club he loves, on the other hand he currently has nothing but contempt for it. “There’s nothing going on at the club anymore,” said Lorant in the SZ podcast Inside 1860, “they’re falling asleep, that’s not possible. We’re talking about up there!”
Up there – where Lorant was with TSV 1860. When the then president Karl-Heinz Wildmoser brought him to Giesing in 1992, the club played in the third highest league, as it does today. Things went uphill: within two years, Lorant led the Sixties into the Bundesliga; The highlights were two derby wins against FC Bayern in the 1999/2000 season and participation in the Champions League qualifier against Leeds United in 2000. Lorant always chose the players himself: “They were all guys, not wimps like today .” Whenever he had a suitable guy on his list, “then I went to Wildmoser and said: Here, this is his address, this is his advisor, clear it up with them.” And the major restaurateur clarified, and Lorant won – for almost a decade.
After a 5-1 defeat in the derby against Bayern on the ninth matchday of the 2001/02 season, Lorant was released – it was not just the sporting failure that was his downfall. The club’s officials increasingly viewed the shirt-sleeved Lorant as no longer representative enough for the Lions’ lofty plans in the course of building the arena with FCB. The arena plans brought increasing estrangement between Lorant and Wildmoser. “He no longer had time for football, he was only with the city, with Bayern Munich and so on,” says Lorant: “I was always against it, I said: Our home is Grünwalder Straße – and not there rear.”
Blissful times: In 1994, the team went straight from the 3rd league to the Bundesliga. Werner Lorant and Thomas Seeliger toast this.
(Photo: imago sportfotodienst; imago/imago/WEREK)
The construction of the arena actually marked the beginning of the years-long decline of TSV 1860, which led back to where it all began under Lorant – in Bavarian amateur football.
Lorant most recently coached the Austrian fifth division club FC Hallein and is now retired from football. The legend went around for a long time that he now lived in a caravan on Lake Waginger, Traunstein district. The picture was too good: the former successful coach who has crashed just like his former club. In reality, Lorant lives in a completely normal apartment on the edge of the campsite: “Let her chat, I don’t care.”