Schwabl: "Parents see each other quickly at Prosecco in the VIP lounge"

Manni Schwabl and Sebastian Kneißl both take care of youth work intensively. They report on the role and their experiences with parents of junior players.

Munich - Manni Schwabl tells a personal story: about the mom, who would love to see her boy at a larger club. "They have such a great stadium," she said, and, as Schwabl suspects, had already used the Prosecco in the VIP lounge. "They only get in there when the boy is playing Bundesliga." As President of SpVgg Unterhaching, who takes care of the youngsters intensively, Schwabl has seen crazy parents, but emphasizes that the vast majority are "totally reasonable" , it's about their kids.

You have to be a little bit crazy, if you want to give the boy the best education. Schwabl talks about parents who spend hours on the highway to get the child into training, mums and dads who subordinate their entire family life to football, who are involved in the club, even if only with cake baking for the next tournament.

Kneißl: Parents leave the most valuable to coaches, their child!

It is the few vultures that ruin the reputation of an entire species. "Emotions are an absolute must," says ex-professional Sebastian Kneißl, who today looks after talent development. "Parents have a completely different relationship to the game than we coaches." If they are directed in the right direction, positive energy can arise for everyone: "The more you involve mums and dads in the work, the stronger the feeling of belonging together." Gratitude, Kneißl demands, should parents feel, "after all, they give us coaches the most valuable thing they have: your child."

A lot of explosiveness would certainly be taken from the relationship between coaches and parents if the over-ambitious fathers and mothers were brought up with the statistics that show how few players, even trained at youth performance centers, can later make a living from football. "The more pronounced the focus on success, the more degenerated fair play becomes a fictitious guide to action in competitive sports," said sports scientist Gunther Pilz when he examined the attitudes of youth players and youth coaches.

Kneißl even finds it exciting when unpleasant parents are involved: "They bring pep to the point." In order not to get tired of it, the young coach would have to be everything: a strong personality, an inviolable expert, a great speaker, educator, psychologist , fatherly friend. But isn't that too much to ask of a youth coach standing in front of the boys after a long, hard day's work? It can be done - with the support of the parents.

And he gets it. Most of the time, Manni Schwabl said. But there are also others who dream of prosecco in the VIP lounge while the son celebrates triumphs on the grass below. However, if at all, that will only be experienced by those who have accompanied their child responsibly and have not harassed them out of wrong ambition. 

Text: REINHARD HÜBNER