And suddenly Martin Schmidt was a Bundesliga coach - and a damn good one at that. In the football talk Heimspiel, the man from Valais recalls his beginnings on the touchline.
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- Martin Schmidt didn't actually want to be a coach - until he learned to love it as an amateur footballer from Valais.
- In the football talk Heimspiel, the Valais native recalls his beginnings on the touchline and talks about working with today's world coach Thomas Tuchel.
- Schmidt's style caught on. An episode when he had his players spend the night in bivouacs and sleeping bags more than 2,500 meters above sea level is fitting.
He didn't want to be a coach at all. Martin Schmidt was something else: a car mechanic, for example, who went on to become BMW's chief mechanic in the German Touring Car Championship. Or an extreme skier - with a palmarès of seven torn cruciate ligaments and two damaged vertebrae. But then, as an amateur footballer from Valais, he learned to love being a coach. Developing ideas, working on a topic with players - and he could also stand having to be the center of attention from time to time. At FC Raron, a small Valais club, that was around the turn of the millennium.
Jean-Paul Brigger, now 67 years old and a former international, laughs out loud. He coached Schmidt back then. "Schmidt as a coach? Certainly not. As much as he did otherwise: in skiing, in motorsport. But looking back, I have to say that he had a lot of skills that a coach needs. He always knew what he wanted. He was open and honest. And he had an influence on the team. By that I mean: he was able to inspire the team."
The junior tournament with the Thun U21s
He clearly succeeded in doing this later on. Martin Schmidt's big moment came at the end of the noughties when he played in an international junior tournament with FC Thun's U21s against FSV Mainz, a team of the same age. Their coach? Thomas Tuchel. Tuchel, still unknown at the time, later called Schmidt. Tuchel's tactics, organization, offensive and defensive play, structure (everything you say as a coach!) impressed him. Could he get to know him? He was allowed to. And the door to the Bundesliga opened for Martin Schmidt.
"Tuchel wanted me to implement the training priorities of the Swiss Football Association in Mainz. Strong individualization. Keywords: striker coach, defensive coach. It was a perfect fit between us and we both benefited from each other." Although, Schmidt adds with a grin: "I naturally benefited a lot more from him than vice versa." The way Tuchel can break a game down into its individual parts is impressive in itself, says Schmidt. "It's only logical that Tuchel will become a world coach one day."
Was it never an issue that Tuchel would take Schmidt to bigger clubs? Dortmund, Paris, Chelsea, Bayern? "Yes," says Schmidt, "there were many requests for Thomas early on. But in 2014, for example, when he left and then signed for Dortmund, I managed to get promoted to the 3rd division with Mainz U23. And I didn't want to miss out on games against big clubs like Bielefeld or Dynamo Dresden."
Successor to Kasper Hjulmand
Schmidt got a taste of big-time football in the Rhineland-Palatinate capital as coach of the U23s, he learned - and he impressed. When the 05ers were threatened with relegation and sacked their coach Kasper Hjulmand - yes: the same Hjulmand who later took part in major tournaments with Denmark and is now in charge of Leverkusen (Schmidt: "Hjulmand was ahead of his time with his possession football"). Schmidt then moved to the front line. Even though nobody knew him.
Emblematic: when regional television asked around the streets of Mainz for a suitable successor to Hjulmand, Schmidt was also asked, as if he were a tourist untainted by football and being asked a question that was irrelevant to him. But with Schmidt playing the clueless man, Mainz not only stayed in the class; in 2016, the club made it into the group stage of the Europa League for the first time.
In a sleeping bag at 2,500 meters
Schmidt's style caught on - wherever he was. A fitting episode is when Schmidt had his players spend the night in bivouacs and sleeping bags at over 2,500 meters. "When the players were told by Michi (Michael Snella, mountaineer, ed.) that they would have to get into their sleeping bags in their underpants, well, they were in a bad mood." The reason: in normal clothes, the players would have sweated so much that cooling down would have been a problem. And unhealthy. "It was still fun for most of them," says Schmidt as a mountain man. And grins.
Incidentally, after his first Bundesliga win, a 3:1 against Eintracht Frankfurt, Schmidt shook himself briefly and thought: "Man, where am I?" Then he pushed the emotions far away as best he could, otherwise they would have affected his work, his rationality. But it was still nice. And by no means the last victory.
