I'm quite excited to see what he can do at a richer club than Paderborn. It was astonishing how entertaining and brave their football was for such a big underdog last season.
Trying to weaken the competition by stealing the coach of a next door neighbor in the table..
Then there is a brewing story about Union Berlin's academy:
First we have this buzzfeed story, reporting how several parents have complained to the Berlin football association about how their kids were treated and dismissed, the article also reports that the ratio of kids with an Arab or Turkish background went down from 40% to 10% within two years when Union's current academy head took over, they claim that their research brought up many families/kids who felt like they were treated as second class citizens, because of their ethnicity. They also claim that agents warn clients of such behavior.
https://www.buzzfeed.de/recherchen/...rwuerfe-union-berlin-bundesliga-90530545.html
Then there is a second component:
Here we have the Twitter account of the Buzzfeed reporter who appears to be in charge of the story. He claims that on last week's monday he sent a catalogue of questions to the club and the academy coach in question, giving them the opportunity to comment until thursday. According to him Union's press officer answered him the following day that they won't fill out the catalogue, but they want to invite him for a chat. Apparently they offered today (several days after the initial deadline) as the earliest opportunity.
Then yesteday (on the eve of the appointment), Union's press officer sent him an email explaining that they have learned that the journalists have acted in bad faith by contacting third parties (apparently DFB and the Berlin FA - which according to the journalist is standard practice) and immediately released a statement condemning the journalists and actually Buzzfeed's own questions with answers on their homepage.
It feels like there is a bad story about Union every other month and even worse: together with Bayern's racism scandal this now marks the second top division academy to face such accusations within a few months, that's already a ninth of Bundesliga and who knows how many more cases are waiting out there to be discovered. I think it's time for DFB to start an honest investigation into the youth system, root out these people themselves right now instead of waiting for journalists to drag them out one at a time.