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DFB President Bernd Neuendorf
Photo: IMAGO/BEAUTIFUL SPORTS/Wunderl / IMAGO/Beautiful Sports
The DFB boss would have a lot to announce: The women's European Championship is just around the corner, the campus in Frankfurt am Main has just been occupied, there is a discussion about whether the national team should still be called "The Team" and what about the Super League will, but all the messages that Bernd Neuendorf wants to place on the occasion of his 100 days in office as President of the German Football Association are lost behind a single word: Qatar.
It is clear that Bernd Neuendorf will have to deal primarily with this for at least the next 100 days.
Qatar keeps getting in his way in a media round on Monday afternoon.
The controversial World Cup in the emirate, the human rights situation there and how the association should react to it: it is the topic of the year – and will remain so.
To Neuendorf's credit, he understood that.
He doesn't even try to circumnavigate the issues involved.
However, he would hardly have a chance to do so.
"My critical stance on Qatar is well known," says the President, which is why the country will "clearly position itself" in the coming months.
But how?
The question arises especially when the national team will be there for the tournament in November.
Efforts will be made to appear there "together as Europeans," says the head of the association.
Secretary General Heike Ullrich will soon be back in Doha to coordinate a possible course of action for the tournament.
"I can't tell you what that will look like in concrete terms."
A »high sensitivity« in the team
In any case, Neuendorf was convinced that "you don't have to ask anything of the team itself on this issue": "I'm sure that we will show our colors there." Most recently, there had been an internal event in connection with the Nations League international matches, who, among other things, informed the players about the situation in Qatar - also about how problematic it is to live social diversity in the emirate.
Neuendorf was also present at the meeting, he had noticed a “high sensitivity” among the national players.
Slight doubts had recently arisen about the high level of sensitivity in the association itself, the ARD sports show reported at the weekend that the German quarter in Qatar had also been set up under sometimes scandalous working conditions.
Neuendorf admitted that he had not had any information about this before, but then "immediately inquired about the situation".
With the result that is still open, he cannot yet say whether the allegations from the sports show are actually true: “It is clear that the working conditions in Qatar were and are bad in many places”.
Whether this also applies to the DFB district is currently being examined.
There are allegations lurking around every corner, that's the price Fifa has earned by awarding the World Cup to the emirate.
Neuendorf was of course not involved in any of these decisions, but that doesn't help him much, he has to deal with it now, and that also means "that we have to take a close look at the large number of service providers with whom we work on site".
Poster allegations dismissed
How difficult it is to deal with the topic and how suspicious the public is of the association was only seen last week when a banner critical of Qatar was shown during the international match against Italy in Mönchengladbach and those who unfurled it afterwards had been checked by the police at the instigation of the DFB.
The suspicion that unpopular expressions of opinion were to be disciplined on the initiative of the DFB arose immediately.
Neuendorf vehemently rejected this: under no circumstances should "the impression arise that this measure was directed against the content of the poster," he said, "I would never not approve such a poster".
Rather, the people were checked because they had already left the stadium when the whistle kicked off and this "atypical behavior" had been classified as suspicious.
However, the association only communicated this with a delay, which is one of the reasons why the outrage was initially great.
For the sake of completeness: The President does not expect the title from the women's national team at the European Championships, he hopes for "creative unrest" from the new campus, he sees the Super League as an "attack on the common good", and about the future of the marketing title "Die Team" should be decided by the end of July.
So much for the side issues.