Christian Gross faces the most daunting task of his storied career: saving Schalke from relegation

Christian Gross, the Swiss manager who has spent the last five years enhancing his worldly reputation across the Middle East, always prided himself on his motivational strengths. If his words do not galvanise his players, he will seek out a powerful symbol. In his younger days in his native Switzerland, he would take his squads to the foot of a mountain, point upwards, and let them absorb the message that no peak is too high to scale if the desire is there. He began a brief, less successful spell at Tottenham Hotspur in 1997 by pointing to the club’s crest and identifying the cockerel on it as “a fighting cockerel”. At Spurs, he clutched a ticket from the London Underground at his presentation and told a sceptical audience of reporters it was his “ticket to dreams.” Gross turned 66 in August, and would be entitled to look back on a varied career with pride, admire his legacy at clubs as different as Basel in Switzerland, Al-Ahli in Saudi Arabia and Zamalek in Egypt and then turn his thoughts to retirement. Instead, he will go into 2021, his 33rd year as a coach with perhaps the most daunting challenge he ever faced – to save Schalke from relegation from the Bundesliga’s top tier. Gross is the fourth different head coach to be asked to do that already this season, a season that is only 13 league matches old. David Wagner, who oversaw the beginning of what is a vicious downward spiral through the disrupted 2019-20 campaign, lasted two matches – two defeats – into 2020-21. Manuel Baum then had 10 games in charge, and at least one major dressing-room flare-up during his 79-day tenure, in which Schalke scratched out four points from a possible 30. When Baum was shown the door, after the 2-0 home loss to Freiburg, the club appealed to the loyalty of Huub Stevens, the Dutchman whom Schalke supporters voted their Coach of the Century in happier times, and who 23 years ago guided them to triumph in the Uefa Cup. Stevens, 67, took over as interim coach for the final match before the Bundesliga’s short winter break. His verdict on the first game of his fourth tenure as Schalke coach, his second as interim firefighter, was damning: “If the players give up, what’s the point?,” he said after the 1-0 loss to Arminia Bielefeld. Stevens saw little enough point for him to make an emergency application to extend his coaching licence, which expires at the beginning of January. He may suspect he has sidestepped a huge blemish on his otherwise distinguished overall record with Schalke. If they fail to win either of their first two matches in the new year, Schalke will match a notorious landmark, the 31-game winless run of a club called Tasmania-Berlin back in 1966. Were Schalke to then take a point or less from their fixture with Eintracht Frankfurt on January 17th, it would mark a full 12 months since they last won a Bundesliga game. Schalke are not Tasmania-Berlin, who only ever spent one disastrous season in Germany’s top division. Schalke are a Bundesliga heavyweight, the club with probably the third-largest fan-base in the country, with a 60,000 modern stadium, who have made it to a Champions League semi-final in the last decade. They are the nursery of world champions like Manuel Neuer and Mesut Ozil. They finished second in the league to Bayern Munich as recently as 2018. By then, a heavy burden of debt, now estimated at around €250 million ($305.7m), was accumulating, however, and the bottom-of-the-table strugglers are still paying an overall wage bill among the highest in the Bundesliga. The squad is not short of promise – in the likes of defender Ozan Kabak and Germany international Suat Serdar – or experience – players such as the former Manchester City defender Matija Nastasic and striker Mark Uth – but confidence has drained, systems malfunctioned, leaving them confronting a first relegation since 1988. Enter Gross, who last year led Zamalek to victory in the CAF Cup, Africa’s equivalent of the Europa League, before returning to Al-Ahli Jeddah for a brief third spell there. “I want to feel the players’ desire every second I am here,” he said boldly on taking up his enviable challenge. What Groos can cite in his favour is his previous work in the Bundesliga. Stuttgart asked him to stave off a relegation threat in 2009. He lifted them from 16th in the table in October to sixth, and a place in Europe, by May. His task at Schalke looks an even steeper mountain to climb.

Christian Gross faces the most daunting task of his storied career: saving Schalke from relegation

Veteran Swiss manager becomes the troubled Bundesliga club's fourth manager of the season