a écrit le 31 juillet 2013 à 18h07 Finke's players, among them new signings from places such as Donaueschingen, Ingolstadt and, again, Havelse gave an impressive answer. They climbed into first place on the seventh day of the season and held that position for the rest of the 46-game campaign to reach the Bundesliga for the first time in the club's history.
More telling than the 1992-93 table, though, were the details. Four Freiburg players made the Team of the Season in Kicker, three of them were midfielders. The side's most successful striker, an Albanian by the name of Altin Rraklli, scored only 16 goals (in 46 games, remember) and finished a distant 10th in the list of top goalscorers. The nominal centre forward, Uwe Spies, found the net only eleven times.
But did that mean Freiburg played a defensive game? Oh, far from it.
The team scored 102 goals, a staggering 20 more than the second-best offence. It was simply that in Finke's football, everyone contributed to both offence and defence. 'Uwe Spies doesn't measure his success in the goals he scores himself,' Finke said. 'Instead, he wants to help create chances.' In 1992-93, Spies set up more goals than any other Freiburg player - and he was the centre forward!
It was new, it was different, it confused traditional football people.
Finke would say things such as: 'I don't want team leaders. That's a line of thinking that buries other players' strengths.' He would shock the members of football's old boys' club of task-masters by saying: 'The only kind of discipline that the team needs is that the players use their heads and make decisions by themselves.' He challenged the star-struck public by declaring: 'Our playing system does not depend on the individual.'
More telling than the 1992-93 table, though, were the details. Four Freiburg players made the Team of the Season in Kicker, three of them were midfielders. The side's most successful striker, an Albanian by the name of Altin Rraklli, scored only 16 goals (in 46 games, remember) and finished a distant 10th in the list of top goalscorers. The nominal centre forward, Uwe Spies, found the net only eleven times.
But did that mean Freiburg played a defensive game? Oh, far from it.
The team scored 102 goals, a staggering 20 more than the second-best offence. It was simply that in Finke's football, everyone contributed to both offence and defence. 'Uwe Spies doesn't measure his success in the goals he scores himself,' Finke said. 'Instead, he wants to help create chances.' In 1992-93, Spies set up more goals than any other Freiburg player - and he was the centre forward!
It was new, it was different, it confused traditional football people.
Finke would say things such as: 'I don't want team leaders. That's a line of thinking that buries other players' strengths.' He would shock the members of football's old boys' club of task-masters by saying: 'The only kind of discipline that the team needs is that the players use their heads and make decisions by themselves.' He challenged the star-struck public by declaring: 'Our playing system does not depend on the individual.'
