In the end, Dietmar “Didi” Constantini stood on the sidelines again and again and saved, saved, saved. In Austria, the fire brigade, police and emergency doctor can be reached on 122, 133 and 144. With Constantini you still needed a Tyrolean area code to get him to the phone – but he was always ready for action. He was called the father figure of all interim coaches in Austria because he always stepped in when the situation was hopeless. This reputation brought the hard-working Constantini to Linz, Mödling, Vienna, Klagenfurt, of course to his Tyrolean homeland of Innsbruck and once even to Mainz. He usually only stayed for a short time, once calling himself a “leased coach”, but his record of avoiding relegation is phenomenal.
He brought an approachable, friendly, although sometimes stubborn nature to the teams (a Tyrolean, it was sometimes said). In the teams he took over, Constantini was usually extremely popular, not least because of his sense of humor: one often didn’t know for sure whether the statements in fine dialect were funny or serious, but sentences like the following were remembered: “As a coach, you have to “You know beforehand what the journalists will know afterwards.”
In Austrian football, Constantini played a remarkable role in contemporary history, as a connector between two great generations. After a solid playing career as a hard-working central defender, he became assistant coach to the great Ernst Happel, who coached the national team despite a serious illness and became a mentor for the young Constantini. When Happel died in 1992, his student took over, but the ÖFB only trusted him with the job on a temporary basis – for the time being.
In 2009, when the grim Czech Karel Brückner lost interest in being the team boss again after a short time, the phone rang in Tyrol; this time Constantini stayed in office for at least two years. Although the Austrians missed qualifying for the European Championships, Constantini still set the course for the future: He relied on the young players, including David Alaba, who thanked his former coach with beautiful words on Wednesday: “Without you, I would be “Not where I am today.”
This applies to many young footballers who were always particularly close to Constantini’s heart. After leaving the ÖFB, he organized training camps for children, then he increasingly withdrew from the public eye. His daughter Johanna made her dementia public in 2019; she wrote two books about the path the family took in recent years with her father, who most recently lived in a nursing home in Innsbruck. Dietmar “Didi” Constantini died on Wednesday at the age of 69.
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