Peter Neururer knows a thing or to about losing a job. The Bundesliga coach has been sacked five times and resigned from three clubs.

A story he likes telling is how he was fired at Schalke 04 while heading for promotion from division two.

Called into president Guenther Eichberg's office, Neururer bounded in thinking he was about to be offered a two-year extension on his contract.

"The president sat there with a glass of wine and I said 'something to celebrate? Good, I'll have one with you'," Neururer relates.

"He then said there's nothing to celebrate, so I replied, 'good, I'll drink one with you anyway.' He then told me I was fired.

*quote1*"I slapped him on the shoulder, saying 'stop those sort of jokes, what's it about then.' But he was serious."

Neururer, 48, can see the funny side now, especially as he is enjoying a successful time with sixth-placed Bochum.

Yet he is an angry man when he has to talk about this season's developments in the German Bundesliga. Four coaches have been sacked in five weeks and others have been put under unprecedented pressure.

Neururer believes the Bundesliga business is becoming brutal with all common decency trampled over.

He describes the dismissal of Ewald Lienen at Borussia Moenchengladbach as "perverse" and of Kurt Jara's sacking at SV Hamburg as "mean".

The deceit practised in Jara's sacking has been particularly offensive to many in the game, coming almost immediately after Hamburg club bosses had called a news conference to pledge their support for the Austrian.

All along they were negotiating with former Bayer Leverkusen boss Klaus Toppmoeller.

Just as worrying has been the win-or-be-sacked ultimatums issued to Dutchman Huub Stevens at Hertha Berlin and Belgian Erik Gerets at Kaiserslautern.

Stevens was sacked this week after a string of disappointing losses culminating in a devastating 6-1 defeat in Bremen.

Gerets and Hanover's Ralf Rangnick - after five matches without a win - could easily join Lienen, Jara, Armin Veh of Rostock, Friedhelm Funkel of Cologne and now Stevens on the list of ejected coaches.

Hertha announced that former player Andreas Thom would act as caretaker coach.

"I can't ever remember a situation where trainers were told to either win the next two games or be sacked," Neururer said.

"I also can't remember the work of a trainer being discussed so publicly as it was with Lienen. One can say that there has been a coarsening of morals."

Stuttgart coach Felix Magath has also criticized the way coaches are now being treated.

Coaching dismissals are nothing new in the Bundesliga - there have been more than 270 in the league's 40-year history - but with the financial stakes of success or failure higher than ever before clubs appear to be panicking when results go wrong.

Magath, vice-president of the German Coaches Association, told Stuttgarter Zeitung that directors now believed the easiest thing to do was fire the coach.

But this policy often backfired, with it becoming difficult to build a team long-term or have any credible transfer policy, he said. Neither could handsome pay-offs ease the pain.

"Must a coach allow himself to be abused and insulted just for doing his job?" he asked.

Many are now questioning whether the intense gaze of the media is contributing to the hire-and fire mentality of Bundesliga clubs, with every small series of failures turned into a crisis.

The mass-circulation Bild newspaper had no qualms about dubbing Schalke coach Jupp Heynckes "Don Flop" - a reference to his time as trainer in Spain - in listing all the mistakes he has allegedly made since accepting the job in the summer.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung commentator Gerd Schneider said the tabloid press and television broadcasters were deliberately turning the supposed failure of coaches into a "shrill sideshow" to sell papers or increase viewing figures.

Even the public broadcasters had thrown off all their former caution and were helping to "overheat the climate". This was particularly embarrassing when they at the same time morally condemned the developments, he said.

Schneider feels Hertha Berlin's ultimatum to Stevens has removed "the last boundary of decency and form".

"One asks oneself why football coaches in cases like this also give up the last bit of self-esteem one needs to end this degrading game," he wrote.

"Maybe there is a small grain of truth (in the saying) that football has its own laws. Beyond all scientific findings, but sometimes also beyond the pain barrier."

December 2003

DPA

Subject: Life in Germany