YB boss Spycher disagrees Frei: "The current YB team is the worst in recent years"
Alex Frei sees a sporting crisis brewing at YB and misses real leaders on the pitch. YB co-owner Christoph Spycher disagrees - and explains in the home game why the balancing act between sporting success and transfer business is becoming a tightrope walk.
No time? blue News summarizes for you
- In the football talk Heimspiel, Alex Frei criticizes the current YB team as the weakest in recent years and criticizes the lack of leading players.
- YB sporting director Christoph Spycher disagrees and emphasizes that financial constraints and the upheaval with younger players are making it difficult to rebuild the team.
- Spycher admits that at times there were not enough experienced players in the squad, but emphasizes targeted transfers to stabilize the team.
The current situation at YB is relatively easy to explain, says Alex Frei in the football talk Heimspiel: "If you have been successful for years and have always had a good team, then the difficulty is to maintain the quality at the same level."
The Nati record goalscorer believes that this has not been possible recently. "The YB team is the worst in recent years," says Frei, adding: "A (Chris) Bedia - who leads the goalscoring charts with (Alessandro) Vogt - is not a nsame for me. Then there are other examples. They have lost (Filip) Ugrinic. I don't see - as of today - any Ugrinic." Putting together a high-quality squad is a challenge, as Christoph Spycher also knows.
Spycher, who is co-owner and head of sport at Young Boys, doesn't want to talk about having the worst team since the championship year of 2018: "Of course we believe in the quality of the squad."
Cheaper players can't be equally good at the start
On the one hand, the very successful time in the recent past has created a much higher pressure situation for the club and the players, only the title is good enough. "You have to work for it. In this situation, we are also confronted with these expectations from outside. The players who are here today feel the pressure. The pressure is not as great as in a top five league, but the pressure is greater than in 2016 or 2017," says Spycher.
On the other hand, they are trying to make the impossible possible. "We try to sell players for 10 to 15 million, on the other hand we buy players for 1, 2, 3 million - in the hope that he can take his place again. But it's clear that he can't be equally good," says Spycher.
In most cases, a player like this has the potential to develop, but that involves work. "If you could say you can sell Fabian Rieder for 15 million and get a player for 3 million to replace him one-to-one, then you'd have to say all the other clubs are doing everything wrong," says Spycher, adding: "Stade Rennes could have brought in the player we got as Rieder's successor."
Spycher: "Didn't have enough established players with quality"
For Frei, there is a lack of leading players on the pitch in Bern so that the others next door can grow faster: "As YB, I would have packed my suitcase in the car and driven to St. Gallen and brought in Görtler. This is still one of the few figures in Switzerland who can at least take on a leadership role." blue Sport editor-in-chief Andreas Böni asks "Wuschu" whether he has knocked on the FCSG captain's door. "No, Lukas Görtler was not an issue for us," says Spycher.
Spycher recalls that in the successful FCB era, the club lived strongly from players such as Alex Frei, Beni Huggel and Marco Streller: "When I took over the team as head of sport, that was also the case for us to a certain extent at the beginning - Steve von Bergen, Guillaume Hoarau, Seékou Sanogo, that was the axis. But a new generation of players is coming in. There are no longer many Granit Xhakas in the teams. The hierarchies are becoming much flatter."
However, Sypcher admits that YB had "too few established players with quality for a while". This season in particular, however, they have tried to correct this: "With Edimilson Fernandes, (Armin) Gigovic, who is not extremely old now, but played in the Bundesliga and has quality, with Gregi Wüthrich." The transfers were made specifically to build a stable foundation and strengthen the axes.
At the same time, Sypcher points out the business side of things, that every Swiss club also needs players in the squad so that money can be earned through transfers. "In the end, there is less and less money nationally, while there is more and more money internationally. As a top Swiss club, you have to try to do this balancing act and be successful at the same time," summarizes Spycher.
