Things have gone a little quiet around Freiburg’s long-standing coach Christian Streich. Now the 60-year-old has come out of retirement to speak out and, among other things, comment on a possible comeback.
The Bundesliga has lost one of its attractions since Christian Streich stepped down as coach. After the 2023/24 season, he ended his 12-year tenure with Freiburg’s professional team, having joined the club’s youth team as a coach back in 1995.
But is that really it? Streich left the door open during a conversation with Johannes B. Kerner on the talk show “Bestbesetzung” on MagentaTV. “I don’t think I’ll coach another Bundesliga team,” said Streich, “but I’m not ruling anything out.”
In any case, interest in Streich as a coach has not waned. “When you’ve been in a profession for so long, it’s inevitable that someone will come up with the idea: Maybe he could work for us,” he explained. However, he did not want to name any clubs, especially since it was “irrelevant.” “I didn’t leave either. Part of the truth is that my fellow coaches in Freiburg were so good that I wouldn’t have dared to go anywhere on my own without them.”
Streich, who played in ten Bundesliga games and 64 second division games, still feels connected to soccer. “I’ll never be far away from it. It doesn’t matter whether I’m a coach in the Bundesliga or no longer a coach, or in the Kreisliga B or in youth football. The ball remains the same. The game remains the same. Until the end of my life.”
Streich sought help with the transition
It was precisely this passion for soccer that made Streich’s departure so difficult. ” It’s about value, about self-esteem,“ said Streich. As a coach, he never had to plan his daily routine because it took care of itself. ”And now all that was gone, no organizational framework, no structure in that sense, it’s not easy.“ He sought outside help to make the transition. ”I just talked to the right man, who was experienced.”
Streich spent his newly gained free time traveling, among other things. Among other things, he went on a bike tour to Bilbao and a trip to South America. He also gives lectures for companies and completed an internship at a bike shop. “I could imagine working somewhere, preferably with my hands. Learning how to repair a bike properly or something like that.”
Responsibility “felt like a burden”
Streich also talked about his intense relationship with the club from Breisgau. “The only good thing for coaches who are fired every now and then and only stay in one place for two or three years is that they have a natural distance,” he explained. “But I was totally immersed in this club.” As a result, he experienced particular, even physically palpable pressure when Freiburg slipped down the table. “I did feel it as a burden. I knew everyone and I knew that if we were relegated to the second division, we wouldn’t be able to pay 15 or 20 of them. That wasn’t easy.”
The opinionated Streich also addressed the increasing commercialization of soccer in the interview. A few years ago, he would have predicted that soccer would “go under, that it would be squeezed like a lemon until there was nothing left. But they can still shoot 500,000 commercials and stick cameras right into the guts of the game. In the end, there will still be kids outside kicking a ball around. And then they won’t have been able to destroy it after all.”
