Legendary Freiburg coach Christian Streich (60) delivers more legendary football quotes in latest interview | OneFootball

In an interview with the MagentaTV program “Best Besetzung”, the legendary Christian Streich has spoken on a host of different issues. A return to the Bundesliga might not be out of the question for the 60-year-old. Unsurprisingly, the man who coached at SC Freiburg for nearly three decades admitted that he found retirement challenging.

“One felt valued and worth something,” Streich said of his old daily routine. “And suddenly all of that was gone. No structure and purpose. It’s wasn’t unforeseeable. Luckily, I found the right person to talk to. Someone who had experience with it. The one advantage coaches who are fired regularly have is that they only stay in one place for two or three years and have a natural distance. I was totally involved at that club.“

Streich retained his trademark modesty when asked about his reputation as German football’s “philosophical conscience“. At one of his final Freiburg press conferences, Streich roundly rejected labels such as “cult” or “elder statesmen“. Streich famously insisted that “cult” status belonged to figures like Mick Jagger and the true “elder statesmen” were the German political figures he worked with at Germany’s Federal Assembly.

“No, no,” Streich answered with a shake of the head before answering the question from the moderator about being the “conscience of German football” or a “moral authority“. “I’m no ‘conscience of German football’. A ‘moral authority’ is Mahatma Ghandi. A ‘moral authority’ is a woman in Northern Bayern or South Baden who ministers people and serves everyone.

“I was of the opinion late on that football was decaying,” Streich continued. “That it was being squeezed too hard [commercially] like a lemon until there was nothing left. I thought to myself, ‘They’re destroying this game’. Now I know better. This game. They can produce 500,000 commercialized documentaries. They can exploit every last figure. They can stick cameras everywhere. They can promote it to death.

“At the end of the day, as long as kids are out there kicking a ball, they can never destroy this game,” Streich concluded to a round of applause.

When the moderator asked Streich himself to recall how he once fell in love with football as a child, the Weil-am-Rhein native fondly recalled the days of growing up in a small Südbaden town. After breakfasting at his parent’s butcher shop, Streich could hardly wait to head outside and hit the pitch.

“To this very day, there’s nothing better than finishing off one’s bread and mounting one’s bike after one heads outdoors,” Streich said. “It’s a shame that I can’t kick anymore as I always loved it. That hasn’t been physically possible for some time. It was so much fun because one could forget about all of one’s problems. The game is so complex that one can’t think about anything else.

“My parents didn’t have time to come and see me,” Streich added. “But it didn’t matter, because I was free.“

The inevitable question as to whether Streich would ever coach a team again cropped up.

“I don’t think that I’ll coach another Bundesliga team,” Streich said. “Though I won’t rule anything out. When you’ve been in a profession for so long, it’s inevitable that someone will come up with the idea: Maybe he could work for us too. There’s been some interest. Part of the truth is that my assistant coaches in Freiburg were so good that I wouldn’t have dared to go anywhere on my own without them.”

Since his retirement, Streich has been traveling, giving a few motivational lectures, and even completed an internship on bicycle repair. The latter activity constituted one of Streich’s specific goals for his newfound free time. In an interview with Kicker shortly after he announced his retirement in May 2024, Streich memorably stated that he wished to “learn how to repair a bicycle properly“.

Bicycle repair will still never supplant football as the absolute love of Streich’s life. Near the end of the interview, it was time for the legend to offer up some choice words on what he found to be “the best thing about football“. After taking only a few nanoseconds to think about it, Streich went with the ball itself.

It was time for the rhythmic cadence of old “Streich der Woche” days!

“The ball is round and the earth is round,” Streich said. “The ball is the small world and the big world at the same time. Whenever we were on the pitch with this ball, that can be used anywhere in the world, we brought the world to our small patch of grass. Just a bunch of lads and lasses on the pitch putting together a little world.”

GGFN | Peter Weis