The time for provocations has not yet come for FC Schalke before this second matchday after their return to the Bundesliga, when FC Bayern Munich will be guests in Gelsenkirchen. Schalke has recently lost to the record champions twelve times in a row; the goal difference in this series is 2:42. The last victory so far came in 2011. So awe would be appropriate, but when Miron Muslić was asked about the outlook for the next game after the 0:3 at FC Augsburg at the start of the season, he said with a smile on his lips: “I’m a sixties fan.”
The Schalke coach loves this kind of subtlety. His words are positive, but at the same time a small conflict flares up from this moment on, which will turn into an energizing major fire in the arena on Saturday. It is unlikely that Bayern will interest Muslić's sympathies for their local rivals, but the process of emotional charging has begun.
Schalke will run until their stomachs cramp, that's for sure. According to legend, “Buckle up, let’s get started,” were Muslić’s first words in the dressing room a little over a year ago. Since then, Schalke 04 has been on a wild upward journey. Inspired by an inexhaustible fuel at this location, which Miron Muslić mines like miners once mined gold: emotions.
Before last season, the then 42-year-old coach said a nice sentence in a F.A.Z. interview: “Almost everything at Schalke 04 is felt as emotion.” Then the Bosnian, who had just been relegated to the English third division with Plymouth Argyle, explained his own personal coaching strategy: "My approach is to feel, understand and classify these emotions. This way, as head coach, I can get into the situation of directing the emotions. Football is a game of emotions, and I like to let myself fall into this world of emotions."
With this approach he stabilized an unsettled team, he overcame periods of weakness, gave a deeply humiliated fan base new pride, attracted players like Edin Džeko who would never have come here a year earlier, and achieved promotion. “Miron brought back the passion and life for the club with his style,” says Timo Becker.
The defender has to know, he has been a Schalke player since birth. As a child, he wonders how his father, after “one or two beers too many,” can find the right entrance to the local mining settlement after the games, where all the houses look the same. Becker still knows the everyday life of the miners who come out of the mine after their shift with blackened faces. And Muslić says in the recently released documentary “Mythos Schalke” that he understands the people in the partly impoverished working-class town of Gelsenkirchen because he himself was once one of the less privileged.
At the age of nine, the pride and joy of his happy childhood in the Bosnian town of Bihać is a BMX bike. The family has a small house, a garden and friends there, but when the parents have to leave the place hastily one day due to the war, all of this is left behind. Also the bike. Years followed in Austria, during which Miron's mother made a living as a cleaner, while his father worked as a waiter in a hotel.
In the beginning, little Miron lived in a room with his parents and sister. The parents take turns sleeping on the floor, the toilet is outside in the hallway. “It keeps me with both feet on the ground,” says Muslić today about these experiences. “One of my strengths is that I have the gift and the strength to be able to differentiate between bubble football and real life,” he said in an interview on Sky last season.
But even as a footballer, his situation remains complicated. The young striker made it into the professional squad of the first division club SV Ried in Austria, but he didn't make it. Here he meets trainer Thomas Weissenböck for the first time, whom Muslić now describes as a “mentor” on his way into the coaching profession. Weissenböck has little to do with the footballer Muslić at SV Ried, but when the recreational coach Muslić shows up years later in a coaching training course led by Weissenböck, the perspective changes.
“I immediately noticed that he had talent,” says the trainer on the phone. “His ambition, his approach to other people, his feel for training exercises and his willingness to learn the coaching business in all its facets were exceptional from the start.” In addition, “Miron has the sharpness to work things out with great clarity.”
Muslić has actually long since moved on to a different professional life, working as a school assistant in intervention classes with children with a migrant background or with disabilities. But the football ambition is burning, and so Weissenböck brings the talented coach into the SV Ried academy, gets Muslić a full-time job in football and enables the next steps in his training.
"Money is often the focus in discussions about a possible collaboration, but Miron simply wanted to learn. I liked that," remembers the Austrian and says: "He was loved in the dressing room. He finds an approach to every player through appreciation, openness and honesty. That is one of his greatest strengths. The players believe him." Apparently until today.
When six Muslim Schalke players stopped drinking or eating before sunset during Ramadan in winter, Muslić does not speak of a weakening, he emphasizes the spiritual powers of Lent, which could also inspire. He himself is fasting, Schalke remains undefeated and takes important steps towards promotion. Somehow everyone always seems to believe this coach.
“Miron comes into a room and immediately reaches an emotional level with everyone present,” says Youri Mulder, Schalke’s director of professional football, who, together with sports director Frank Baumann, squad planner Max Lüftl and Muslić, forms the sporting director of the professional department. It is also said that something has grown together on a human level here. In the dressing room, Muslić also speaks the language of the street, which is known because parts of his speeches are repeatedly published. English is mixed with sentences in German, the energy level is often at its limit.
When he wants to reinforce a statement, he adds a pleasurable “fucking” to it. The impact of these moments is enormous, but it is unclear how Muslić's emotionality and rhetoric work in phases of failure. Apart from a first, very short stint as head coach in Ried, he has always met all expectations. He led Cercle Brugge to the European Cup, but with Plymouth he was relegated after taking over the team in an almost hopeless situation in the middle of the season.
And in the FA Cup he defeated the great Liverpool FC. “My development as a coach was like a rocket,” says Muslić, who sometimes looks for limits. So before Christmas he sat down at a press conference wearing the clothing of the extremely controversial Ultras GE and said that he wore the shirt “with great pride”. He tells stories of “blood, sweat and tears” and claims: “I am the happiest coach in Germany because I get to work for Schalke every day.”
But what would he say if he were to move to Stuttgart or even Munich at some point? Some observers already find Muslić too pathetic when he beats his chest in front of the north curve after victories like a Viking after winning a battle.
But the majority of Schalke are at the coach's feet even in moments like this, and Mulder says: "I feel it's absolutely genuine with him. Schalke takes you with them, I've experienced that too. My impression is that Miron really feels connected to this club. I also know that from our conversations."
In the context of this emotional force, another facet is easily overlooked: professional competence. What Muslić managed last season is a small masterpiece. At the end of the first half of the season, the team was in first place in the table and had scored relatively few goals in 17 games, but had only conceded ten goals in 17 games.
“I still thought, we're at the top, we hardly get any goals, the offense wins games and the defense wins championships,” remembers Mulder, who was extremely satisfied.
After all, Schalke is coming out of a very, very deep crisis; no one expected this success. “But Miron said we have to change that,” says Mulder. So with Dejan Ljubičić, Adil Aouchiche, Moussa Ndiaye and Edin Džeko, four strong players are brought in, who immediately displace four previously placed colleagues from the successful starting eleven. At the latest when this plan works despite initial difficulties, sports director Baumann and his board colleague Matthias Tillmann can congratulate themselves on a sensational coaching coup.
A few months earlier, the two compared their list of coaching candidates. Schalke has just ended the most unsuccessful season in the club's history, the team is ridiculed, and the famous "Your Failure" banner hangs in the north curve. It is clear that a new coach has to come - the only name that both had written down: Muslić.
Baumann noticed the talent when he watched Olivier Deman, who played under the Bosnian at Cercle Brugge for Werder Bremen. And Tillmann had heard of Muslić because he had impressively lifted a devastated team in Plymouth.
Now he seems to be able to do the same with FC Schalke 04, which is on the threshold of a stable future after years of decline. “The special thing is that the extremes are there,” says the very reserved sports director Frank Baumann, who previously worked in Bremen and who, with Muslić, Mulder, Tillmann and Lüftl, forms a constellation that masters these extremes so skillfully that some Schalke players even believe the unthinkable is possible: the first win against Bayern Munich in 25 years.
