Good morning everybody. Welcome to my today`s post in this blog. Inspired by the requests of several of my readers, I take this opportunity, to share my opinion and experiences about soccer with You and I will explain why for my opinion passion for soccer and general management combine perfectly.
Bad news first! Let me tell You the truth. I have never played soccer in my whole life and I hardly know the rules.
As a six year old boy, living in a small village in the middle of nowhere in Germany, I desperately wanted to play soccer. One day I convinced my hesitant mother, to take me to the local soccer club for registration. But something totally unforeseen and not acceptable at all for me had happened there. Some of the young players at the soccer club of our small village started laughing and joking about me because of what they described as my “bowlegs”.
Sometimes things finish before they have started. I urged my mother to leave this soccer club immediately and to take me back home. From that moment on, my interest in soccer turned zero and I never played soccer, even not during my school times, where I consequentially preferred other ball sports like volley ball and basket ball. And my repugnance towards soccer continued from then on for in total 17 years.
During my studies of chemical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe, at the age of 23, I used to relax always for an hour or two after lunch before continuing my learning exercices. One saturday afternoon, when I was lying comfortably on the old sofa in my students appartment, the music programme on the radio finished and the live transmission of a Bundesliga soccer match started. I was half sleeping and much too lazy to get up and switch the radio to another channel. Thus I started to listen unintentionally to the soccer match live transmission on my radio. And it impressed me as a very nice means for disconnecting easily and totally from the world around me and especially from my learning exercices subjects. From then on I started to accompany the Bundesliga live transmissions on the radio during the saturday afternoons. But it was much more the very enthralling style of reporting and the background noise in the stadiums, than the soccer matches themselfes, what distracted and fascinated me.
The real fascination for soccer caught me 1996, during the first months of my in total three years as Project & Engineering Manager at Henkel`s chemicals and adhesives plant in Jacarei, Sao Paulo, Brazil. At that time I was living in Sao Jose dos Campos, a nice and quite big city, where our brazilian pride Embraer has its headquarters and manufactures it`s airplanes. On a saturday morning my american colleague Tracy Hunt, a process engineer from Henkel`s big chemicals plant in Cincinatti, USA, who was visiting me in Brazil for two weeks, and I decided, to drive very early to Rio de Janeiro, where we had not yet been until then. For the afternoon on the same day we had bought tickets for the “classical” soccer match between the two local “carioca” teams Flamengo and Fluminense, which we wanted to watch in the world-famous Maracana stadium. Actually it was Tracy`s desire, to go there and I just agreed to accompany him.
To drive from Sao Jose dos Campos along the Dutra highway to Rio de Janeiro should have taken us approximately five hours. But something unforeseen happened and prolongued drastically our travelling time to Rio. During those years the brazilian highway police used to stop frequently cars travelling on the highways for doing “general inspections”. They usually checked all traveller`s identification documents, controlled the content of the luggage department, confirmed that a fire extinguisher was on board, looked at the tyres and demanded the cash payment of relatively small fines.
This was exactly, what happened to Tracy and myself. The police stopped us shortly after our departure from Sao Jose dos Campos on our way to Rio. And my very intelligent colleague Tracy had forgotten to take his passport with himself for our trip. But travelling without an identification document was not foreseen in the rules of the brazilian highway police. Therefore the police officers let us park our car in front of their office container besides the highway and made us sit inside the container in front of their desc for a hell of time. To be true – we had no clue, for how long this was foreseen to continue and how we would end up there. When my friend Tracy desperately begged the policemen, to let us please continue our travel, because we needed to reach the Maracana stadium before the match began in the afternoon, the situation changed immediately and completely. The astonished policeman behind the desc asked us to reconfirm, that we had planned to see the match between Flamengo and Fluminense in the afternoon. When we confirmed this desperately and showed him our tickets for the match, he jumped up from his chair and urged us to run to our car and get away quickly because otherwise we would not be able to make it in time and loose the opportunity to see the victory of Flamengo against its adversary.
At that time I was already fully aware of the importance of soccer for the Brazilians, but the crazy passion of the policeman for his team Flamengo and his decision, to forget all rules and let us drive away, surpassed my imagination, how far the soccer fever can lead people. After the exciting 2:1 triumph of Flamengo against Fluminense in the wonderful, recently modernized, Maracana stadium there was no more remaining doubt for me, that I had to become a passionate Flamengo fan from this moment on too. And this passion for Flamengo never cooled down since then, although my friends and colleagues in Sao Paulo never really accepted this “treason” and endlessly tried to convince me, to substitute my passion for the carioca team Flamengo by passion for one of the big soccer teams in Sao Paulo.
This collage of fotos shows You some pictures of me during important events of my two most beloved soccer teams Flamengo (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and Deportivo La Coruña (La Coruña, Spain):
In June 2000 I gained another deep learning session about the importance of soccer for many people and many times as well for the management of businesses. This happened exactly on the day of my arrival in La Coruña, Galicia, Spain, where I lived and worked in total three and a half years during my time as Managing Director of Schwarzkopf & Henkel`s “La Toja” cosmetics plant. Actually I had just come driving by car from Düsseldorf, Germany, to La Coruña, Spain, with all my possessions left over from my recent divorce behind me in the luggage compartment of my car. When I stationed my car in the underground parking lot of hotel “Maria Pita”, another car pulled in and stopped on the parking place beside me. I got out of my car and a small black boy and his father got out of their car too, smiling very friendly to me. It was immediately clear, that we liked each other. But when I asked the man for his name, his small son for my absolute surprise got almost petrified with his mouth wide open. Something obviously had been wrong with my question about his father`s name.
A few days later I understood, why the small boy did not understand my stupid question. His father was the brazilian soccer star Mauro Silva, the great hero of Deportivo La Coruña, the local soccer team, which just had won the legendary spanish soccer league for the first time in their club`s history. The whole city including all my employees admired this wonderful man, whose new neighbor I had just become. From then on I met Mauro, who besides an outstanding soccer player was a very intelligent and nice person, several times and we always laughed about our first encounter and my ignorance. For the years end party of my company, I bought a flag of Deportivo and asked Mauro, to let all players sign it. My employees loved me. The flag became framed behind glas and was hung at the central wall of our canteen.
Consequentially I became a member of the Deportivo soccer club and during my time in La Coruña, I watched many spanish soccer league matches of Deportivo together with colleagues of my management team and other friends in the local “Riazor” stadium. By the way – I could walk from my appartment in the hotel building at the other end of Riazor beach to the nearby soccer stadium. During these years, all soccer matches became wonderful familly parties and the stadium was constantly booked out when Deportivo was playing there.
On 8 September 2001, Deportivo played its 1,000th game in La Liga. In 2002, they won the Copa del Rey for a second time in their history with a superb 2–1 win against Real Madrid. This match is commonly known in Spain as the Centenariazo. Deportivo’s illustrious opponents were expected to win the final comfortably as they were nicknamed the Galácticos and were among the strongest teams in Europe at the time. Additionally, the final was being played at their home ground, the Santiago Bernabéu. Imagine the party which was happening in La Coruña from the end of this match on and through the whole night everywhere in the city.
After my return from Mexico – to where I had moved from Spain for six years during my times as Managing Director of renowned german automotive supplier companies there – to Brazil, my passion for soccer in general and especially for Flamengo have increased tremendously and whenever I can arrange this, I watch Flamengo playing matches – either on the TV screens in our house or in Maracana stadium in Rio de Janeiro. My fifteen year old son Gabriel has also become a fierce supporter of Flamengo. Thus we can nicely assist the national soccer league games together and with friends, at home and sometimes also together at the Maracana stadium.
Soccer and general management have in common, that for achieving success in both disciplines team spirit and close and efficient cooperation between all players are fundamental for gaining success.
During one of my future posts I will describe this direct relationship a little more in detail at the example of my great idol Jürgen Klopp, trainer of the FC Liverpool, the recent winner of it`s first english soccer league triumph since thirty years.
Thanks for having accompanied me in my post today. Looking forward to seeing You back here again tomorrow.
3 Responses
Great Klaus in my humble opinion I believe that in the future, you could write a book about your biography.
My dear friend, that`s exactly what many of my globally distributed friends are suggesting to me since many years. But to be frank, true and sincere, I don`t think that I would ever find the patience for writing a book. I write my life. That`s much more thrilling and sexy. And I am also very doubtful, whether there would be really too many people interested in reading this. To write daily short stories in my blog posts is much more appropriate to my life and work style and in the end I might still publish a complilation of these once in the future. Why not? If one day a publisher approaches me, I will think about it.
Very nice comment received from a friend currently travelling in Southeast Asia: "Boa tarde,
Wirklich sehr lesenswert die täglichen Blogeinträge. Die Geschichte gestern mit dem Flamengo-verrückten Polizisten ist wirklich einmalig. Ich freue mich bereits auf die nächste Folge. P.S. vielleicht sollte es zurück nach Coruña gehen. Da läuft es fußballerisch ja nicht mehr so rund wie zu Ihrer Zeit 🙂