And The New Manager of the All Whites Is… Fritz Schmid!
Fritz Schmid. Fritz Schmid. Fritz Schmid. What do we know about Fritz Schmid?
One thing we know is that he’s the new All Whites manager, replacing Anthony Hudson after a three-month scouring of the globe for somebody that ticked all the boxes, from coaching licences to the ability to “enhance the brand and profile of NZ Football”. They hired an independent recruitment firm to do the dirty business and there was a shortlist of names in there somewhere amidst an inundation of responses to the gig (according to NZF, at least).
Easy as it is to be cynical about it, at least NZF didn’t piss around in finding the new gaffer, despite their echoes about money money money. Three months all up, while still managing to book a trip to Spain next month to play against Canada (behind closed doors… but expect a live stream or something) to make sure that they were all ready to go once the new boss was announced.
Which presumably means that this Schmid bloke fulfils every one of these criteria, as reported by old mate here (good on ya):
By the way, this might just be a personal distaste for corporate bollocks but being able to produce for “a wide range of stakeholders” and talk about branding, amidst the black tie recruitment process, all seems pretty discordant with the very visceral, somatic, instinctive game of football. Like, it’s hard to see how that makes any difference to whether a bloke can convince eleven talented individuals to follow a quality game-plan but I guess they’ve got other interests to look out for as well. And it’s happening all over the world too. The growing corporatisation of football just doesn’t feel like a very healthy thing for the true stakeholders: the fans. (Won’t somebody think of the fans!?)
Hey and isn’t it funny that they went to all those lengths to source the very best candidates possible, asking them to clear all these hurdles, and they ended up with an old colleague of Andreas Heraf’s? Fritz Schmid is a Swiss national with a limited managerial pedigree but plenty of history as an assistant. He spent seven years with FC Basel under Christian Gross as well as getting in experience as a youth team manager at GC Zurich and FC Aargau and serving as an assistant manager for Tottenham Hotspur for a little over two months in the late 1990s (10 games all up, also under Gross). Then he served as an assistant for the Austrian national team for a couple years under Marcel Koller at the same time as Heraf was involved there.
Schmid subsequently worked as a technical director in Malaysia before apparently doing some stuff for the Asian Football Confederation as a “consultant for Strategic Planning Missions”. Curiously he’s also freelanced as a coaching consultant and worked for five years as a journalist back in the day, having studied it at university. He is 58 years old and his middle name is Markus. He naturally speaks German but is also pretty fluent in English, French and Italian with a little Spanish in there too. In 2011 he wrote a book entitled: ‘A Systemic Approach to Chaos and Selforganising Processes in Football’. All this and more, folks. It’s in his CV which is linked on his website.
You’ve gotta say the dude’s packed an impressive array of stuff into that CV. The obvious concern is that he’s not got very much head coaching experience, generally working as an assistant or higher-up. Having said that, assistant coaches are often more hands on in dealing with players and the higher-ups tend to have the bigger picture in mind – which might be better for an international manager at a team like New Zealand. Anthony Hudson came in as a career manager with a particular style of play that he wanted to see, building a team around his tactics. We don’t know if Schmiddy will come in with tactical baggage or not but, given his background, you’d figure he’s got a fairly well-rounded footballing philosophy. And he’s worked both at some top standard clubs in Europe (FC Basel are the premier team in Switzerland) but also in Malaysia where his job was more about facilitating and developing the sport. New Zealand, you’d imagine, will fall somewhere in the middle.
(Side note - see, this is why football is The Beautiful Game. In other sports, coaches have ideas. In football, they have complete philosophies. All the answers to the mysteries of the universe can be ascertained from the kicking of a ball around a rectangular area of grass for ninety minutes if you lok hard enough).
Schmid will be assisted by the U20 and U17 bosses, as already confirmed: Des Buckingham and Jose Figuera. Just quickly, Figuera probably shoulda go the 20s and Buck the 17s, but there might have been some personal preference in there with Figuera having been in charge of the U-17s once upon a time before until Anthony Hudson’s alignment strategy kinda got him dumped. Cool to see him back in there given his successes with Team Wellington.
It’s too early to know what we’re getting into with Schmiddy. His promo photos suggest that he’ll pass The Steven Adams First Impression Friendly Smile Test but the rest is all part of the journey. What we can already gauge is that the Andreas Heraf takeover is well underway. The dude hasn’t even been in the technical director gig for a year and already he’s making plays. Combining that job with being the head coach of the Football Ferns now (which is arguably a bigger job, though probably not as time-consuming) and now here’s a bloke gonna coach the men’s team whose only connection to NZ footy that we know of is… Andreas Heraf.
And you know what? That’s fine. Nothing wrong with bringing some different thinkers into the NZF mix, Heraf is a respected fellow and, most importantly, he’s not another English battler coming here like a colonial missionary. Heraf came to Aotearoa with the Austrian U-20 team for the World Cup and loved it so much he came back to stay. Ended up with a job at NZ Football, a huge job. One that inadvertently allows him to slice into Andy Martin’s power structures and bring some footy thinking into the corporate boardroom.
Plus Heraf isn’t about lovin’ and leavin’. Anthony Hudson did his thing for four years and there were frustrations along the way (he certainly fitted the Andy Martin mould of being a Tidy English Professional), but he left the All Whites in a far better place than where they were when he began. It wasn’t his job to help pass the torch. All goods.
Heraf’s it kinda is. Hence he’s been talking about getting Gareth Turnbull qualified to succeed him with the Ferns, as well as spreading his gaze across the whole country rather than just the hubs in Auckland and Wellington. That’s impressive, to be honest. We’re gonna have to trust him on the Fritz Schmid thing… but after years of NZ Football-related dumbassery, for once that doesn’t seem completely and entirely inconceivable.
Mate. Cheers for reading, but before you go, make sure to smack an ad and help The Niche Cache continue to lay this stuff down on the regular. Patreon donations are particularly appreciated!