In an interview with Bild, Volker Struth, the agent of former Bayern Munich coach Julian Nagelsmann revealed a ton of details regarding his client’s sacking. Chief among them was the fact that the coach and his entourage were completely blindsided by the news, being told about it directly from the media.
“I was in a Cologne restaurant with Carsten Maschmeyer and also met the actor Jan-Josef Liefers that evening,” said Struth. “We were drinking a bottle of wine when I received a call from a journalist who said to me: ‘That went quick with Julian!’ I answered: ‘What do you mean?’ And he said: ‘How, you don’t know that yet? Julian is out and Tuchel is the new coach!’”
Struth then walked out of the club, first calling his partner Sascha Breese and then Nagelsmann himself, who was on holiday at the time. “We got more and more messages during the evening and then contacted Julian,” said the agent. “He didn’t know anything either and asked us something along the lines of, ‘Are you kidding me?’”
He further goes on to contradict Bayern’s messaging that Nagelsmann was fully informed through official channels before he was sacked by the club.
“One, two hours later, the density of information through the media became so great that Sascha Breese then contacted Hasan Salihamidzic and asked via WhatsApp: ‘Do we need to know something?’ And then came the call: ‘Why don’t you come to the office at Säbener Straße tomorrow?’ And then we knew there was something to it.”
If Struth’s version of events are true — which, to be honest, lines up with the incredibly rapid timeline of events we got when the news first broke, then Bayern Munich displayed amateurish conduct by allowing their head coach to be sacked by media report. It makes you wonder about the thought put into the whole exercise — whether anyone at the club actually sat down and considered how this would all work out.
Oh well, that cat is never getting back in the bag. The Julian Nagelsmann era is over, and it ended in the most spectacularly unexpected way.
