Hitzfeld should be remembered as one of the greats

By Simon Wright – Follow me on Twitter @Siwri88

The game of football has seen many great managers. Remembered fondly are the likes of Sir Alex Ferguson, Bill Shankly, the late Sir Bobby Robson and Guus Hiddink.

While Jose Mourinho and Pep Guardiola continue to entertain us on a regular basis in today’s game, another of the great breed has decided to retire after the 2014 World Cup finals.

Ottmar Hitzfeld has decided that the tournament will be his last in management. The 64-year-old has had a great career, winning all the major honours and has steered Switzerland to their most successful period since the days of Roy Hodgson in the early 90s.

Under Hitzfeld’s reign, the Swiss recently went through an unbeaten campaign in European qualifying, beat Brazil in an international friendly in August and were confirmed as a surprise top seed above the likes of Holland, Italy and England by FIFA on Thursday for December’s World Cup draw.

Now after six years with the Europeans, he will step aside and continue his media career with a German cable television channel in post-retirement.

Hitzfeld (pictured) only narrowly missed out on my top 10 list last year of the greatest managers of all-time. It was very hard to exclude him, considering his proven track record as a manager, especially in the Bundesliga.

He is one of only four coaches to win the European Cup or Champions League with two different clubs in its glorious history. Of today’s breed, only Mourinho can claim to have matched that feat. He has taken Borussia Dortmund to the summit of club football and got Bayern Munich over the line too via a penalty shootout to win the 2001 Champions League final in Milan against a stubborn Valencia side.

As a player he was pretty decent too, netting 169 league goals in 296 competitive appearances for FC Basel, FC Luzern and Lugano, separated by a three-year spell in Germany with VfB Stuttgart. His management career started 32 years ago and after winning two Swiss Cups and two Swiss Super League titles with Grasshoppers Zurich, he took the Borussia Dortmund post in 1991.

While the Bundesliga was quite an open league with no dominant force in the early 90s, Dortmund was not a well-fancied club but Hitzfeld took them to the brink of total supremacy. After experiencing disappointment with defeat in the 1993 UEFA Cup final to Juventus, the team bounced back to win back-to-back Bundesliga titles in 1995 and 1996. A year later, they got their revenge on Juve to defeat them in the Champions League final, known best for Lars Ricken’s goal seconds after being introduced as a second half substitute. That success won him the World Coach of the Year award in 1997 but his reward from Dortmund was effectively the sack.

A year later, Bayern Munich came calling and he accepted the role and they had great success as a partnership. There were four Bundesliga titles between 1998 and 2003 and the Champions League in 2001, two years after experiencing the pain of the Barcelona defeat against Manchester United.

After leaving in 2004, he took a break from the game but returned to Bayern in 2007 to replace the sacked Felix Magath. Another Bundesliga title followed but he stepped down in May 2008 after a humiliating 4-0 semi-final defeat to Zenit St Petersburg in the UEFA Cup.

That was his last role in club management as he took over the Switzerland role after their failure to get out of the group stage at Euro 2008. The new reign started badly with an embarrassing 2-1 loss to Luxembourg in qualification for the 2010 World Cup but the Swiss recovered to finish top of their qualifying group.

Hitzfeld took the country to South Africa and they stunned Spain to beat the favourites and eventual winners of the tournament in Durban in their opening match. Unfortunately, Gelson Fernandes’ winner was the only goal they managed in the three matches and elimination followed in the group stage.

Despite failing to qualify for Euro 2012, he kept his job and rightly so with his proven track record. This has been shown by promoting a new generation of Swiss players with the likes of Gokhan Inler, Valon Behrami and Xherdan Shaqiri playing for some of the top European clubs.

In a statement on Thursday, he said: “After 30 years in the strength-sapping world of football, my time has come to stop.

“I can live without football; there are more important things in life.”

I can agree with that last statement. Ottmar Hitzfeld is going at the right time for himself and can look back on a very successful career in football. He has had a great time at the top and has to be remembered as one of the greats in management.