A key figure leaves Hertha Berlin. Why is Fredi Bobic’s departure a hard blow?

Hertha BSC has terminated its cooperation with sporting director Fredi Bobic in response to his vulgar remarks towards a journalist after losing the city derby at home to Union. Rather than Bobic’s words, however, the reaction was sparked by the club’s decision to end a year-and-a-half-long association with one of German club football’s best-known officials. What will this decision mean for Hertha’s dream project of building a world-class club?

“If you ask again, you’ll get slapped.” That was the response of the now former sporting director of Hertha Berlin when asked about his confidence in the team’s coach Sandro Schwarz after the clubs lost the Berlin derby. However, this certainly unacceptable comment was quickly picked up by the club’s management, who terminated their cooperation with Fredi Bobic the same day. According to several sources, his comment served more as an excuse.

Kicker reported that the club’s management had already prepared a proposal for the termination of cooperation before Saturday’s duel with city rival Union, which they approved after the 0:2 defeat, accompanied by the quoted statement, and immediately acted on it.

Kicker’s claim that Bobic has been criticised internally for some time for his transfer policy, choice of coaches, tense atmosphere and, as a result, disappointing results is backed up by Derek Rae, who points to the former club sporting director’s long-standing disagreements with president Kay Bernstein.

Reacting to Hertha’s actions, Sport1 recalled that the contract termination came shortly before the activation of a clause in Bobic’s contract that would have automatically extended its duration from 2024 to the summer of 2026. That was due to happen in mid-February.

Bobic himself described the club’s behaviour in recent years in a recent interview with the Gegenpressing podcast as follows. But it needs more than talk. You need to actually work on it.”

Fredi Bobic joined Hertha BSC in the summer of 2021 after a very successful stint in a similar role at Eintracht Frankfurt. His tenure was thus terminated after around a year and a half. One has to give credit to the critics that three coaches were replaced on the bench during this short period. However, it is also fair to mention that Hertha had five different head coaches between July 2019 and November 2021.

It was in November 2021 that Bobic replaced Pal Dardai with Tayfun Korkut. It was a move that didn’t really work and just 14 games later he was replaced by the extremely uninspiring Felix Magath. It was a move that was criticised to the point of ridicule at the time. Magath, however, kept Hertha in the league and as planned, retired at the end of the season at the approaching age of 69. At least the managerial one.

The second permanent coach of the Bobic era was Sandro Schwarz. And despite the fact that even his points scored per game is far from the statistics collected by coaches before Bobic came to the role of sporting director, there was a more positive atmosphere around Hertha this year.

The signings of players, although appearing austere or even ‘hipster’ after the Berlin alterna-tion of the Galácticos project, fitted into a certain concept. The club were also leaving behind the accumulated reinforcements of earlier years, who often had neither a place in the team nor a sale value.

It was not without its faults. One is certainly the sale of left-back Luca Netz to Borussia Mönchengladbach. For just €2 million. Another blunder in the frantic search for central midfielders over the last few years may prove to be the transfer of Arne Maier to Augsburg. Also, all the arrivals did not celebrate success, but that is not to be expected either.

Especially when the club is shopping with a tight budget. The efforts of Lars Windhorst, an investor in the club, have ended, like several of his activities, in financial failure. Hertha unwisely spent money before Bobic’s arrival and at least until the expected involvement of 777 Partners in the club’s structures, we probably won’t see much spending on their part.

This is even though Bobic has made a significant profit during his time at the club. With a spend of slightly over €30 million, he brought in around €75 million by selling players to the club. The sale of Matheus Cunha to Atlético Madrid for €30 million and Jhon Córdoba to Krasnodar for €20 million helped a lot, but it is still an excellent balance considering the purge being carried out in the squad.

Hertha didn’t dawdle, and the very next day after parting ways with Bobic, they announced the promotion of previous long-time academy manager Benjamin Weber to the role of sporting director. Bobic himself continues to serve in the DFL, the German football league, as a member of the board.

Among football officials without club-level jobs, he may soon be joined by the coach he hired in Berlin, Sandro Schwarz. The distrust of Bobic and the first steps of the new sporting director could fall on him as well. If that were to happen, Hertha would have a fourth coach in just two years.

Whether any steps Hertha BSC will take will be sufficient to save themselves is difficult to predict. Currently, the club sits second to last in the table with 14 points. However, the sacking of Bobic dealt a nasty blow to the direction of the club, which had given many a positive impression, although it did not produce immediate results.

At the same time, Bobic finally seemed to be the man to build the Hertha BSC brand on a global level. However, it was only him, three years after the club had set this goal, who took them on a tour of such a key market as the United States. For now, it seems that soccer fans will be wearing Union Berlin jerseys at their home World Cup rather than their by-then quite possibly second-tier city rival.

Sources: Hertha BSC, Kicker, Derek Rae – Twitter, Sport1, Gegenpressing podcast, Transfermarkt