TBF to Hoeness, when he took them over, the team had sold the likes of Joelinton, Schulz and Demirbay and didn’t do a good job replacing them. Hoffenheim will always be a small village team at the end of the day, and apart form a few outliers are very much the definiton of a mid-table team, as they where under Hoeness. Also it was his first head coach job.
What he’s done this season at Stuttgart is genuinely mad. Rightly Alonso and Leverkusen get the plaudits, but taking that Stuttgart team into the CL is even more incredible.
Yeah, I'm sure there is extenuating circumstances but the Hoffenheim stuff just looks very, very average - and maybe even bad.
Agree on the Stuttgart stuff. I just think most big clubs will want to see him repeat that feat (or drop a little but do alright in the CL/EL) before diving in and handing him the reins. I actually didn't appreciate that he coached Hoffenheim in the EL, in his first season. They actually won their group comfortably, albeit the other teams were Red Star, Slovan Liberec and Gent so not particularly strong. They then went out to Molde in the first knockout round. Again, think we'd want a bigger/better sample size of European achievement from the new manager, given the expectation is that we'll be in the CL every season.
Don't think Amorim massively ticks boxes here either but has much more experience - got Sporting through their CL group in 21/22 before being eliminated by City, failed to progress from their CL group in 22/23, but then got to the quarters of EL and eliminated Arsenal in the process before going out to Juve. Then this year, finished second in their EL group to Atalanta before then being narrowly eliminated by them in the round of 16... which given last Thursday doesn't look too bad.
Point being, we love data and I just don't think we have enough of it to make a call on Hoeness.
