Stefan Leitl in the portrait: The trainer who is supposed to lead Hertha BSC out of the crisis

As the youngest of five brothers, you have to have a certain enforcement capacity, otherwise you don’t get much if the mom gets the sweets out of the basket after shopping. It has not been handed down whether Stefan Leitl got enough gummy bears. He himself says that he had spent “a wonderful childhood without an elbow use”, because the age difference to his brothers had been more than ten years. In any case, he was not neglected in the distribution of the soccer talent in his family.

“The youngest will be the best of everyone,” it said at the end of the 1980s when Stefan’s older brothers Wolfgang, Reiner, Christian and Jürgen also mixed up Munich amateur football and he himself kicked in youth at FC Bayern. Only Reiner made it to the second division at SpVgg Unterhaching. Then a few years later came the Nesthäkchen, which did not make the breakthrough on Säbener Straße at Bayern, but ran for Nuremberg in the Bundesliga and later, as captain of FC Ingolstadt, became a fixed second division.

In the meantime, the 47-year-old is an established trainer, which is why it is not surprising that he was introduced to Christian Fiél at Hertha BSC on Tuesday. Hertha’s sports director Benjamin Weber revealed that they were contacted with Leitl and his assistant coach Andre Mijatovic in the past week-i.e. before the defeat in Düsseldorf-who had played for Berliners from 2010 to 2012. It looked like he had chatted. Did Fiél be informed that his potential successors have already been sorted when he was still in office? Weber then didn’t go into this.

“Berlin is as big as it used to be,” says Leitl’s assistant coach on his return to the capital

Leitl, on the other hand, conveyed a few impressions of the “super intensive first unit” on Tuesday morning, and his assistant Mijatovic has already found that the capital had not changed since the time when he rose to the Bundesliga with Hertha: ” Berlin is as big as it used to be, and the Olympic Stadium is still as big as it used to be. ”

You only have three training sessions before the home game against Nuremberg on Friday, said Leitl. Until then, he had to “get a feel for the players, also for how they tick in certain situations”. On Friday you will “go to the limit energetically to get three points”. In the team, everything you need to be successful can be found: “Experience, talent and many attributes that we are now trying to get on the field.”

The pressure on the new coaching team is high: after four defeats in a row, the Hertha is only five points in front of the relegation place. “I do not want to speak of the descent, it is about creating the turnaround, getting into points and teasing out what is in the players,” says Leitl, who denied what was told in Berlin before his presentation: that He was also rested in the coaching office because he is friends with Andreas Neuendorf, the head of the license player department: “Tick and I played together in the U21 and Ingolstadt, but that’s not the decisive point why I am here today may.”

Leitl had to go in Hanover, although the team was only one point behind third place

Before the season, the capital had been flirted with the return to the Bundesliga, although service providers such as Marc-Oliver Kempf or striker Haris Tabakovic had to be sold because of the financial emergency. Now hopes are suspended on Leitl, whose contract runs until 2027. He has already proven that he can lead a team to the Bundesliga when he rose with Greuther Fürth in 2021. After the direct descent a year later, the coach packed his suitcases – voluntarily, and although he would have had another year. This consistent species is now also in demand in Berlin.

You always have the Bundesliga at Hannover 96 as the goal, Leitl’s youngest employer. After the ranks of ten and six in the past seasons, he was supposed to return to the upper house this season. And so it was a bit bizarre shortly before New Year’s Eve, because at that time the Lower Saxony was only one point behind the relegation rank. Under the new coach André Breitenreiter, the distance is already five points. The down -to -earth leader, who sometimes looks a bit grumpy, had already been counted in the summer of 2023 by Hanover’s majority shareholder Martin Kind (“If I would say everything I think, then we would have war”). However, his discharge was “very surprised,” says Leitl. Mijatovic and he used their seven -week break to charge their batteries, “we were busy for six years at a time.”

Now there may be a new edition of a men’s flat share: In Fürth, the two had already come up with the idea of ​​contracting. “We have a similar family situation, both have three children, I live in Ingolstadt, Stefan in Munich-Ismaning,” said the assistant. There it is obvious, then you are in the stranger together. The strict chief Leitl did not want to commit himself yet: “Andre didn’t cook so well in Hanover.”