The Hansi Flick ‘second season curse’ has been on the tongues of many of those with a keen eye on La Liga. From his first managerial job in the 4th tier of Germany to being the head coach of the German national team, this alleged curse has followed Flick throughout his pathway to becoming one of the most revered coaches in Europe. But where have these whispers turned full-on discussions stemmed from and do we have reason to believe that they might actually be true?

1995. The town of Bammental. 31 year old Hansi Flick was fresh off a relatively notable playing career in the Bundesliga, featuring for the likes of Bayern Munich and FC Koln and winning his fair share of silverware in the process. But his physical capacity to play at the top of German football was dwindling and his mind began spinning around the prospect of what may come next after he’s all but hung the boots up.

*Hansi Flick in midfield action for Bayern Munich. Image via Dailymail.co.uk*

Victoria Bammental was a side which Flick had a personal affliction towards and it was there he began his coaching journey as a player-manager. In his first season at a club not too far from where he grew up, a then relatively inexperienced Flick saw his side finish 11th out of 16th in his first season of managing and proceed to back it up by getting relegated in the following campaign, where curse is said to begin. The German coach stayed with them in the 5th tier before eventually joining Hoffenheim in 2000.

Flick spent 5 years at Die Kraichgauer. Overseeing a promotion to the 3rd tier of German football in his first season and an historic win over Bayer Leverkusen in the round of 16 of the DFB Pokal in his penultimate. Though they never really made a dent at the top of the table of the Regionalliga Süd, Flick’s ability to consistently keep Hoffenheim in the upper mid-table spots of the league showed heaps of promise.

This would also prove to be his last head coach role until 2021. In order to evolve as a tactician, Flick turned to assistant manager roles at RB Salzburg, Germany and Bayern Munich. His most successful stint being as the national team’s number 2 which saw them finally get their hands on the World cup in 2014 amongst consistently reaching the latter stages of all other major competitions.

So far there’s not much to suggest any remnants of any ‘curse’. But then Flick joined Bayern Munich as head coach in 2019. And won everything possible there was to win in his first season. And then watched as his Bayern side failed to reach close to that level in the following year and he stepped down only a year after winning the sextuple.

Then he took over as head coach of Germany. A side unrecognisable from the one he had departed just 7 years ago, trying to pick up the pieces of disastrous World Cup and Euros campaigns. And for the first year and a half they didn’t lose a game.

But then they did.

Flick’s second year as head coach coincided with the 2022 World Cup which Germany went into having lost just once in 16 games. Germany didn’t make it out the group stages and Flick and the rest of the squad were sent packing in disbelief.

Last year we watched Hansi Flick win La Liga in his first season in glorious yet eyebrow-raising fashion. Barcelona were undisputedly one of the most entertaining teams in Europe to watch, but their absurdly high line had pundits and fans alike gaping and scratching their heads as to how it was so effective. But I sit here today, Barca’s high line looks as vulnerable as it’s ever been since the German takeover. The Catalan giants don’t seem to be at their liquid best going forward or going back and so the question begins to beckon. Is history repeating itself? Is the Hansi Flick second season curse actually real?

There might be something here…

In the four ‘second seasons’ Flick has on his resume, he was relegated in one and stepped down as head coach in two. Hoffenheim has been the only situation thus far which didn’t see noticeable regression in the quality of his side over a year.

His first 12 games in charge of Germany were seamless. 8 wins and 4 draws and an impressive 28 points, countless of goals scored and very few conceded. The last 13 games Flick managed paints a different and pretty depressing picture of 4 wins, 4 draws and 5 losses, 16 points, few goals scored and countless conceded.

First season at Bayern. 6 trophies and a place in history. Second season. A loss to Holstein Kiel in the 2nd round of the DFB-Pokal and an exit at the hands of the PSG team they’d beaten less than 12 months ago, in the quarter-finals of the Champions League. The Bundesliga crown was defended but not easily as Flick would’ve liked. He proceeded to step down.

With these two case studies and now seeing Barcelona struggle in their first games of the season, Flick’s heavy-metal, attacking football seems like it may come with long-term drawbacks. Too many numbers high up the pitch leaves less defenders back to stop counter-attacks. Suddenly their suffocating press to win the ball back is a second too late or out of sync, they look leggy and unable to find solutions in attacking areas. The high line slowly becomes a weakness to exploit rather than a strength as coaches find out ways to manoeuvre past it, such as having a number of players run in behind from deep positions or having one player constantly stand offside (Rayo Vallecano striker Isi Palazon did this extremely effectively in a recent 1-1 draw with Barcelona).

Coaches, for all their stylistic differences, are raging tacticians at heart. Constantly tweaking and trying to evolve, looking to one-up their opponent on the pitch. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to beat Flick’s high line, right? Too many great coaches are out there and once one figures out, the blueprint of how to beat it passes through the rest of Europe like wildfire.

You could argue we saw it in the latter stages of last season’s Champions League campaign. After Barcelona knocked 4 past Borussia Dortmund in the first-leg of the quarter finals, Dortmund followed it up in the return leg by scoring 3 (with an xG of a whopping 3.81). They limited Barcelona to an unheard of 2 shots on target and were whiskers away from knocking them out of the competition if it wasn’t for countless missed chances at the hands of their forwards.

Barcelona found themselves slightly lucky to be in the semi-finals, but against Inter, they shipped 7 goals in 2 games due to the same issues that caused them so many problems against Dortmund: Deep runs into the final third, height in the box, being direct. Disregarding the possession and constant genius from Yamal, Raphinha and Pedri, the Catalan giants had conceded 10 goals in 3 games and the whole world was watching.

So now do we find ourselves in a position where Flick’s kryptonite has been unearthed once again and is this the reason why we see such drop-offs in his follow-up campaigns? Surely there’s too much data here for this all to be coincidental?

No chance mate, curses don’t exist

Let’s start by saying that Barcelona remain unbeaten so far this season. 3 games, 2 wins and 1 draw in the league is by no means a bad start to their campaign. In fact, since their historical tie with Inter, they’ve played 7 competitive matches, winning 6 and losing the other to Villarreal. Not much evidence here to raise any serious red flags.

When you also begin to apply context to Flick’s second season as Bayern coach, you also realise it’s a lot less dire than it was painted out to be. They won the league by 12 points and scored the same amount of goals as the season prior. In fact, even defensively Bayern weren’t too far off where they were the year before. Yes they conceded over 10 more goals in the league, but xG wise they actually conceded 1.19 goals per game which is slightly less than the 19/20 campaign - so this difference in goals can be attributed to a poor campaign from Manuel Neuer.

In their aforementioned quarter final tie against PSG, Bayern were without arguably their two best attackers in Lewandowski and Serge Gnabry who were both out with injury and they still dominated their French counterparts over the two legs. If anything, they were unlucky to progress to the semi-finals.

*Mbappe celebrating his 2nd goal of the game against Bayern. Image via TNTSport.com*

Obviously there’s no getting away from the loss to 2nd division Holstein Kiel in the DFB-Pokal. It’s a huge black mark on Flick’s resume and will live on in the history of German football. But can that be attributed to a huge fall off in the level of the squad, or can we point to an air of complacency and lack of effort that has created so many great upsets in modern football? These upsets happen and will continue to happen for the foreseeable future.

Hansi Flick’s second year in Bavaria was also one of constant dispute with the hierarchy. One of the best midfielders in the world in Thiago had left in the summer of 2020 and wasn’t adequately replaced, much to the German’s dismay. Bayern followed up their sextuple with the additions of Bouna Sarr, Marc Roca, Choupo-Moting and a past-his-best Douglas Costa. The lack of investment was a cause for tension between Flick and board members, in particular Sporting Director Hasan Salihamidzic and the relationship between coach and club quickly deteriorated. So is it a surprise there was a slight regression in quality in the 20/21 season? When you consider Bayern had lost a truly elite midfielder in Thiago, failed to replace him, and for a lengthy period of time had Eric Maxim Chupo-Moting deputising for an injured Robert Lewandowski at a pivotal time of the season, you can understand why there may have been a slight fall-off.

So what about Flick’s stint as head coach of the German national team? My rebuttal to the second-season curse claim is that Germany were never really very good. They were, and still are going through a big dip in the quality of the players they’re producing since the golden generation of 2008-2014. They were unbeaten in their first twelve games, yes, a great achievement, but when you look at who all these games were against… World Cup qualifiers against the Iceland, North Macedonia, Armenia, Lichtenstein and the like, and these are all games you’d expect Germany to win pretty emphatically. As soon as Germany came up against any serious teams who could pose a real threat to them, they began to struggle. In 7 games against England, the Netherlands, Hungary and Italy leading up to the World Cup, Germany managed to pick up 1 win, losing 1 and drawing the rest.

*Germany’s memorable 3-3 draw with England. Image via mid-day.com*

Failing to progress out of the group stages is an embarrassing feat for Die Mannschaft and Flick. There can be no excuses for it. But some coaches need time to impose their principles and tactical identity on their squad and I think Flick is one of those. If you combine the fact that he is a coach probably more suited to club football, with Germany’s lackluster squad, you begin to see the path towards impending doom that they were unknowingly walking towards. In hindsight, maybe the appointment wasn’t the greatest idea and I’m not trying to make excuses for his failures with the national team, but the reasons stem far beyond a ‘second-season curse’.

Germany are no longer a footballing superpower with the likes of Spain, France, England, Argentina and others. The recent 2-0 loss to Slovenia signifies this entirely. Flick was a bad fit for a bad team and that resulted in a horrible two-year period, but no manager since Flick has seen drastic improvements to the national team, suggesting the problems run much deeper than who the coach is.

Conclusion

In football, nothing is black and white and so the answer to whether there actually is a ‘second-season curse’ isn’t a simple yes or no and is more up to what you choose to believe once you piece the evidence together.

For me, I don’t see a curse. Flick’s football has points of weakness that can be identified and exploited, but this is the case for many managers. The small drop-off we saw at Bayern may be attributed to this reason but can also be attributed to a lack of investment, key player exits and club politics which caused incohesion amongst the squad.

If we see Barcelona fail to reach their soaring heights of last season, we must remember that they are still a reasonably young and inexperienced team bound to face down periods rife with inconsistency. Although they strengthened defensively with the addition of goalkeeper Joan Garcia, the loss of Inigo Martinez, one of the most underrated centre-backs in world football that was pivotal to their high line being so successful will be sore. We’ve seen this before.

Barcelona, like Bayern in the summer of 2020, probably didn’t invest in new arrivals like they should have as you can still point to a few holes in their thin squad. Martinez hasn’t been replaced and Rashford’s arrival, though an exciting transfer, is still not guaranteed to take the attacking burden off the likes of Yamal, Raphinha and Lewandowski.

An undisputed world class coach, I’m sure Flick knows about his team’s shortcomings and will be actively looking to rectify them. If in his first season he was able to steer Barcelona to being just a few games away from winning the treble, surely he’s talented enough to evolve the side over time and iron out the current teething problems they have with their high line and press.

*Hansi Flick and new coach Thiago finally reunited. Image via QueThiJugules on X*

If there’s a spell of eight games where Barca look like they’re really struggling, which I’m not ruling out this season, people will quickly throw around the ‘second-season curse’ as if this explains everything. But the truth is that there’s often more than one reason why a team may experience downturns at different points of the season.

Putting it all on a ‘curse’ is unfair on and simply isn’t true. The 2020/21 Bayern team weren’t imperious but were still brilliant and Barcelona have the players and attacking options to cause any side a plethora of problems. Sometimes we need to look a bit below the surface to find all the answers we need.

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