Hans-Dieter Flick named “Best Manager of 2020” by the IFFHS

Hans-Dieter Flick, Bayern Munich’s manager, has received an award for his great work in the past season, “Best Manager of 2020” by IFFHS, and that should not be a surprise. After all, Bayern have been the strongest football team in the world this year. But it’s a good opportunity to look back on the man’s career in football and everything that he achieved, which granted him the opportunity to coach the team of his life.

The International Federation of Football History and Statistics (IFFHS), the institution in charge of registering football records and statistics, has announced the winners of its annual awards, in which Hans-Dieter Flick, 55-year old, stands out as “Best Manager of 2020”. And we think that the prize is well-deserved; Flick did an outstanding job at Bayern Munich last season creating a perfect football machine.

However, many supporters and experts were not pleased when Flick took over at Bayern Munich following the departure of Nino Kovac. If we do a memory exercise, a little more than a year ago, the current Bavarian manager was just announced as interim manager at the Allianz Arena and many football enthusiasts were hoping for a quick appointment of a more experienced coach. However, in that short period Flick passed from zero to hero.

Flick, as a player, was a midfielder who did not have an outstanding career, considerably affected by injuries, although he did have a period at Bayern Munich that lasted 5 years and where he achieved his main successes as a football player: 4 Bundesligas, 1 DFB-Pokal and 1 DFB-Supercup. In 1996, Hans-Dieter Flick began his career as a manager while still active as a player at Victoria Bammental. The team was relegated and, the following year, Flick moved on to Hoffenheim, in the lower division of German football, achieving the promotion.

At the beginning of the Red Bull era in football, when Salzburg was acquired, Flick had a brief stint at the Austrian club working as assistant coach of Giovanni Trapattoni. According to Flick, Trapattoni was the coach who taught him the most and how to be a successful coach despite the two were often fighting: Trapattoni is well-known for his defensive approach while Flick was focused on rebalancing the team in the midfield. After the Salzburg experience, in August 2006 Flick became Joachim Löw’s assistant in the Germany national team.

It was during this working experience, in 2014, that Flick managed to lift the World Cup in Brazil and was later appointed sporting director of the German Football Association. At the beginning of the 2019-20 season, he was appointed assistant to Niko Kovac at Bayern Munich. After Kovac and the management of Bayern Munich decided mutually to interrupt the working relationship, Flick took over as interim manager bringing Bayern Munich to a series of outstanding successes culminated with the victory in the final of the 2020 Champions League against PSG. He recently extended his contract with Bayern Munich until 2023. Congrats for the outstanding successes!