Fabian Hurzeler: The 30-year-old coach transforming St Paulis season -

St Pauli’s training ground is to the north of Hamburg. It is a home away from home, lying at the end of a potholed road decorated on either side with graffiti and colour. It lies under a local flightpath, meaning the club cannot use drones to record their sessions. At least, not without navigating a forest of paperwork and permission slips first.

Inside an auditorium on the main building’s second floor, a flip chart stands open, cautioning players over the danger of an opponent’s long throw. Big letters, exclamation marks. Through a window on the other side of the room, behind the chairs and projector, the cadence of youth training can be heard outside when Fabian Hurzeler, the club’s new head coach, walks in to introduce himself.

The long throw did not do any damage. On Sunday afternoon, St Pauli won their fifth straight game under Hurzeler. A first-half header from Jackson Irvine, one of the team’s two captains, was enough to beat Hansa Rostock in a match contested under a canopy of wispy fog.

But the skies have been clearing above the Millerntor Stadium. Those five victories have blown away any lingering 2. Bundesliga relegation fears. The latest came on their head coach’s 30th birthday.

Simply #Airvine 🛩#fcsp #fcspfch pic.twitter.com/jyKHC241DS

— FC St. Pauli English (@fcstpauli_EN) February 28, 2023

That will attract attention — especially in Germany. Football is a tags-and-labels world, somewhere where lines of succession are forever being plotted and Hurzeler will have to contend with that. More important for now, though, is that his players have bought in and are responding to his coaching.

It is just in time. They were reeling before the World Cup and entered the winter pause above the relegation places on goal difference, with last season’s optimism having been vented away. The turnaround has been quick and dramatic; their confidence has been rebuilt and areas of their game appear toughened and improved.

The decline was not a surprise. Under Timo Schultz, to whom Hurzeler had been assistant since 2020, St Pauli punched above their weight. They were autumn champions of the 2.Bundesliga in 2021 and, in January 2022, they knocked Borussia Dortmund out of the DFB Pokal with a defiant performance. But they would miss out on promotion, eventually finishing fifth, with the resulting hangover lasting through the summer and into the new campaign.

“You have to see it from two different perspectives — the sporting side and the mental side,” Hurzeler tells The Athletic. “We lost good players from a team in which everyone knew their role. But opponents also analysed us and had better and better solutions for our system.”

Schultz had been at St Pauli for nearly 20 years as a player then manager before his December sacking (Photo: Peter Niedung/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The departures were devastating. Ghana forward Daniel-Kofi Kyereh was sold to Freiburg for €4.5million (£4m;$4.8m), an offer St Pauli could hardly refuse, and Guido Burgstaller, who had reached the veteran stage of his career, returned home to Austria. With those two players went 30 league goals, 16 assists and plenty of belief.

A promotion opportunity for a club of St Pauli’s size is rare and, Hurzeler concedes, the combination of seeing it slip away, with the added punch of losing such quality, did emotional damage that could not be quickly repaired. The new season began and St Pauli weren’t the same. By the time the season paused for Qatar 2022, they had won just four of 17 games.

It was a run that would cost Schultz his job and cause trauma for the club. From player to youth coach and eventually to manager, he had spent almost 20 years at St Pauli and became a club institution. It was difficult for Hurzeler, too. He was appointed on an interim, then quickly a full-time basis, but not before talking to Schultz. The two remain in contact; Schultz texted his congratulations after the Rostock win.

The other awkward aspect was the relationship with the players. Dynamics change when an assistant becomes a head coach and, potentially, a confidante or a companion becomes the decision-maker and, sometimes, the bearer of bad news.

“In the first meeting I had with the team, I told them I wouldn’t change — that I’m still Fabian — but that I will make tough decisions and decisions which might be hurtful.

“Something changes in the way you communicate. I said to myself: OK, now you’re the friendly authority. I’m young and some players may be older than me, so I’m not going to be someone who shouts at them and treats them like children. I’m on their level and I want to convince them through ideas, through my hard work.”

He met initially with a core of senior players and was open about how unusual their situation was.

“I told them I knew it was strange, but I was open about it — I wanted their thoughts and I wanted to talk to them about it.”

It has been highly successful. St Pauli have scored seven times and conceded once in Hurzeler’s five games. They are not unrecognisable — the back three remains in place, as do many of the starting players — but the themes within their play are different, as has been the tone of those performances.

The first challenge for him was to restore the team’s confidence and provide it with an identity — and his footballing upbringing has helped define his coaching beliefs. He was born in Houston, Texas, but left the United States when he was just a few years old. He is one of four children to a mother and father who work in dentistry and who moved from Zurich to Freiburg and, finally, to Munich.

As a teenager, he spent several years within Bayern Munich’s youth academy and graduated into their second side. It had a profound effect.

“I spent 10 years at Bayern, so it’s in my DNA to want possession and to dictate the game,” he says. “That belief is still deep inside me. But I’ve learnt so much in the second division, which is a lot about long balls and set pieces and that you have to be very intense against the ball. You need to be able to defend deep and to defend high.”

He is engaging to talk to. There is a humility to him, too. The temptation for many young coaches is presumably to overstress their readiness and credentials as a sort of over-compensation. Hurzeler is not one of those. He is more collegiate, talking of how valuable the staff around him have been and remains aware of just how much there is to learn. He will complete his UEFA Pro License in the coming week and we talk about the differences between coaching theory and football’s reality — about the experience of press conferences and media duties out in the wild rather than in the classroom.

But there is agency to his work because plenty has changed at St Pauli. Training is now in the morning rather than the afternoon. Previously, Hurzeler believed preparation for sessions was not quite optimal. Much of his coaching team’s work can be seen in the team’s transitions, too, and that has been a keen emphasis.

“We wanted more stability,” he says. “We’ve conceded too many goals that way in the past because we weren’t positioned very well when we had the ball, so that’s something we’ve really worked hard on — our rest defence.”

The work has paid off because the defensive record is now excellent. There is a different urgency to the side’s work without the ball and a level of intensity which, perhaps, had fallen victim to the despondency the new coaching team has been working hard to cure.

So, this seems to have been a good decision. Hurzeler knows that the more St Pauli win and the greater attention is paid to his age, the more the media interest will increase and the quicker the comparisons will come his way. Difficult comparisons. Some that will not fit and will not recognise that he is not trying to be anyone but himself.

For now, though, he is still just Fabian. His team are playing well and nobody is thinking too much about tomorrow.

(Top photo: Selim Sudheimer/Getty Images)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57k2ttcG9pZXxzfJFsZmlrX2WAcL%2FTZqearZyeeqetwaKYp2WYqr%2B7scueqWg%3D