Adelaide United coach Marco Kurz had a successful first year in the job, but he admits he had to make some adjustments
ADELAIDE United coach Marco Kurz had a successful first year in the job, but he admits he had to make some adjustments.
AUSTRALIAN footy fans like to think they are a passionate lot. But everything is relative. Just ask Marco Kurz. Kurz is in his second year of coaching Adelaide United in the A-League, but the German has also developed something of a passion for the indigenous Australian game since touching down in South Australia.
Kurz loves the “intensity” of Australian football. Loves the way the players can get bowled over, flattened and smashed, then bounce straight back to their feet and play on. The rules occasionally confuse him, but then again they confuse plenty of locals as well.
Kurz hadn’t been in South Australia too long when he went to the Adelaide Oval to watch last year’s Port Adelaide v West Coast elimination final. That was the one where Eagles player Luke Shuey kicked a goal after the siren at the end of extra time to knock out the Power.
In the stands at the Oval, Kurz was expecting, if not a riot, then at least some strong reaction to this painful loss. He was soon to learn Australian and European fans are a little different.
“In this game, I support Port and I was angry,” he says in his German accent that somehow seems to amplify the emotion.
“When they shot the goal they (Port) were out and the season is finished. And I look around and I was maybe the only person who was angry.
“And the other people they say ‘OK, see you next year’.”
Then as he made his way out of the Oval, he thought there may be a little trouble between rival fans. “But it was calm,” he remembers. “I thought in Germany, no chance. No chance. Here the support is different.”
The 49-year-old is about to lead the Reds into a new A-League season after a debut performance that won him and his team many plaudits.
By the end of the season, Kurz was being hailed as a top-notch coach and United congratulated for bringing him to town.
There’s a refreshing straightforwardness to Kurz. He answers questions directly, even if frequently apologising for what he sees as his lack of English skills. He needn’t bother, his once-a-week-English classes — which he says he hates — are clearly going well. He’s also considerate, trying to find a switch to turn off a fridge because he thinks its low hum might interfere with my tape recorder. But there is also the underlying impression that Kurz is a serious, hardworking kind of bloke as befits a player who survived in the German Bundesliga, one of the toughest leagues in the world, for more than a decade, playing 300 games across a variety of clubs including FC Nurnberg, Borussia Dortmund and 1860 Munich.
After playing, he coached in the Bundesliga until he surprised himself by moving to South Australia. Asked why he left the centre of the football universe to move to Adelaide, Kurz gives an unusual answer. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t really know.”
But as he works through his thoughts, he comes to a different conclusion.
He says he had offers before to work outside Germany but had knocked them back. Then his agent rang with the news Adelaide wanted to speak to him.
He spoke with Reds football director Ante Kovacevic and he sounded out former Adelaide player Paul Agostino, whom he knew from playing days.
Chats with partner Tammy were crucial, there was a quick visit to Adelaide for a look around, and a decision was made. “I felt in this moment that I am hungry for a complete new competition in my life,” he says.
By his own admission, it was a competition and a league which he knew nothing about. But surely, football is football and Kurz had been thoroughly immersed in the game since his earliest days.
Born in Stuttgart, his father Edgar was a player and a coach in the lower divisions but Kurz says it was never certain that he would make it.
“You cannot decide (to be a professional footballer),” he says. “It’s a dream.”
Kurz played either as a centre back or a midfielder. Asked to describe himself as a player, he says he was “more a hard worker, a strong player with a good attitude with a good winner mentality”. The right mentality is key in Kurz’s world view. Finding success in such a competitive competition as the Bundesliga is not an easy task. And even when you make a team, any complacency will kill you.
“The challenge is very, very hard in Germany, so if you do a wrong job you are out of the squad or out of the league,” he says. “You have to fight for your starting position. That’s week to week. If you train not good enough the other guy plays, or if you play shit or not good enough. You have to perform every day.”
This is the message he is now trying to impart to his players in Australia. And his coaching philosophy mirrors his playing style. He studied for his coaching qualifications while still playing. His first job was in the third division helping out a friend and he discovered he enjoyed the role. It wasn’t as good as playing but what is?
He also found the reality of being a coach a lot more demanding than merely being on the park. “As a player you drive to training, have a coffee before you train. Maybe the training is good, you say ‘oh, good coach’ or when the training is not what I accept then you say ‘oh my God, what shit training’, and then you drive home.
“But as a coach, you have 20 or more players and you look after each of them. All of them has a different mentalities, qualities. You have to improve each of them and that is very hard.
Then there is the medical side of the job and the even more demanding media.
“In Germany it’s very hard with the media, it’s a lot of work. Sometimes you have more work to do with the media than the boys.”
Then, of course, any coach in a big league such as the Bundesliga is only ever three or four games away from crisis and being sacked. It happened to Kurz at Fortuna Dusseldorf, his last job in Germany before heading to Australia.
“It’s part of the game and you have to accept it if you will be part of the game,” he says, although he concedes losing a job is never pleasant.
“You need time,” he says. “You need time to work out, to think about what the reasons were. What I can do better the next step.” But at some point you have to let go and move on.
“It’s very important to make a tick after this and look forward,” he says. “It’s not good to look back because you cannot change it. The only thing you can do is make it better in the future.”
Kurz didn’t know what to expect when he arrived in Adelaide, but he knew the standard would be lower than what he was used to. One of his first tasks was to improve the fitness of the players so they could train more. “I cannot train the same volume as in Germany because I have to improve the players step-by-step to get them in a better fitness,” he says.
There were other aspects of the Australian game to get used to as well. The travel between games, the lack of fans in the stands, the long, long pre-seasons.
“In Europe, we have six-and-a-half weeks then you start,” he says. “Here you have six- and-a-half weeks and then you have the cup season. Then after another two months, you start the season.”
There are practical problems. In Europe, teams tend to head out of town for a training camp. Inevitably, there are a few other teams from other countries there as well and games are easy to organise. In Australia, the distance between teams of a similar standard makes that more difficult.
It’s like the notion of what constitutes a derby. In Europe and in other sports such as Australian rules, it’s obvious — it’s against a team in the same city.
“I learned here that it’s a derby if you play against a team that is 650km away. That for me is new.”
Then there is the money question. Australia is not alone in this. It’s a truism around the world that the richer clubs are the more successful ones.
Adelaide has never been one of the A-League’s wealthier clubs. It has never attracted a star import such as Sydney has done with the likes of Dwight Yorke and Alessandro Del Piero. It could never afford, as Melbourne Victory has this year, to recruit Japanese superstar Keisuke Honda or even Swedish World Cup player Ola Toivonen.
There is a salary cap in the A-League, but it’s flexible.
“When you are a rich club, the salary cap is good. When you are a poor club the salary cap is shit and we are not really a rich club. That’s a problem but that’s our position and we will do our best,” Kurz says.
It didn’t change when the club’s ownership changed last year from the consortium including businessman Robert Gerard and lawyer Greg Griffin to a mysterious offshore company with Dutchman Piet van der Pol as its public face.
Kurz says with the new owners “everybody think now we can get to the next step”, but budgets have remained tight — making the recruitment of overseas players a constant challenge.
“We have to find very good players for our budget,” he says. “Also to find overseas players who are hungry for Australia and not a holiday.”
United has also been very good of late at bringing through local players and Kurz is a believer in the need to better develop Australian talent. He is an advocate of making the match day squads larger so he can give experience to younger players.
“They need the experience in the official game under pressure to improve. In training it’s easy, but in front of a crowd they have a chance to improve.”
But below the professional level he also believes Australians could do more to improve the standard of playing and coaching.
More money should be spent on facilities and more attention paid to improving the quality of the coaches teaching the game to kids. He believes a youth academy should be part of the licensing requirements for all A-League clubs.
“When I drive home, I see the parks here — they are unbelievable, the spaces and a lot of kids play football. Maybe I see more kids playing football than other sports.
“You must spend money on facilities and also in quality in staff and manpower. It’s not a job for a dad to coach young boys, it is the job of a good coach.”
Adelaide takes the first step of its new season with a home game on Friday against premiership favourite Sydney — which it meets again at home on October 30 in a replay of last year’s FFA Cup final.
Sydney is another team that has splashed the cash, picking up Siem de Jong, the former captain of Dutch giants Ajax.
It’s just another sign to Kurz that this season’s competition will be even tougher than last year when Adelaide lost to Sydney in the Cup Final and qualified for the finals. The Reds’ coach is keen to improve on last year’s efforts.
Kurz arrived in Adelaide on a two-year contract, meaning this could be his last. At various times last season, he was linked with higher-profile jobs in the eastern states. Kurz naturally is not looking that far ahead as yet, but knows that in football life can change very swiftly. “I will see, I will see,” he says. “I am always open for everything. I don’t know.”
Adelaide United kicks off its A-League 2018-19 season against Sydney FC at Coopers Stadium on Friday at 7.20pm, premier.ticketek.com.au