It sounds like a bang: “Florian Kohfeldt is training again on the Weser”. But what is supposed to be sensational news from Bremen is actually his first engagement with a foreign club, the “Königliche Allgemeine Spielvereinigung Eupen”, which is based in the first Belgian football division.
Eupen is the capital of the so-called “German-speaking Community of Belgium”, a region of 78,000 inhabitants on the border with Germany, only 15 kilometers from Aachen. And like Bremen, it is also on a river called the Weser, the Belgian Weser, “Vesdre” in French. The people here went from Prussians to Belgians after the First World War, and they feel that way too, but with German as their mother tongue. KAS Eupen is the only club from the region that has ever made it into the first Belgian football league, now in its eighth consecutive year. There you measure yourself against rich traditional clubs like RSC Anderlecht, Standard Liège, FC Bruges or the new top clubs like Royal Union Saint-Gilloise and the newly crowned champions Royal Antwerpen.
Florian Kohfeldt was presented to the Belgian public last Thursday. He will be joined by Dutchman Vincent Heilmann from VfL Wolfsburg and athletics trainer Chris Verona. From a Belgian perspective, Kohfeldt is a complete unknown, only his two previous coaching positions are immediately associated with Belgium’s star player Kevin De Bruyne. Although Eupen struggled to stay up in the league and the Flemish (i.e. Dutch-speaking) and Walloon (i.e. French-speaking) sports journalists see the German language as an obstacle, more than 20 of them attended the presentation of the new coach. An unusually great interest.
First talks in Cologne, both sides feel good
“The Kehrwegstadion is narrow, the fans are close and I like that,” said Kohfeldt and immediately gained sympathy with his down-to-earth manner. It’s easy to make a mess of things with the East Belgians, for example if you order “Pommes” like in Germany, which are called “fritten” here and, along with beer and chocolate, are cultural assets that connect and create identity across language borders. “I didn’t put my foot in it,” Kohfeldt says of his first culinary experience.
The Eupeners had been in contact with the former Werder coach for a long time. But only after the end of a lean season, in which the stay in the Belgian top league was hanging by a thread, was the contract signed. Eupen’s club boss Christoph Henkel, a former youth coach at 1. FC Köln, did not provide any information on the conditions. So they met for the first meeting in Cologne and both sides immediately had a good feeling, says Henkel. Does the past of the new German coach help to put out feelers for new players in this direction? “I think the name of the coach always helps,” said Henkel, and continued: “But only as a first step. What is decisive, however, is that with this name we have clearly shown that we have ambitious goals that we also want to achieve.”
In his first days in Belgium, Florian Kohfeldt showed himself to be a thoroughly working football manager, very German. He is thus in illustrious company, for example the former HSV professor Bernd Hollerbach, until last season coach of the Flemish first division club VV Sint-Truiden. Thorsten Fink, who was last hired by Al Nasr in Saudi Arabia, was presented as his successor a month ago. Until 2017, Sint-Truiden belonged to the millionaire and politician Roland Duchâtelet, who is now joining the regional league team FC Carl-Zeiss Jena in Germany. And the reigning Belgian national coach Domenico Tedesco is German-Italian with several stints in the Bundesliga, most recently at RB Leipzig.
Kohfeldt sets an ambitious sporting goal
The players of the still-to-be-assembled Eupen team come from all over the world, and English is usually spoken in the dressing room. In his first interviews with German-language media, Kohfeldt also prefers to keep it a little professional and distanced and stick to the “you” instead of using the familiar name.
The preparatory program is tightly organised. Next weekend, on a side pitch in Eupen, they will face the neighboring club RFC Liège, little brother of the great Standard Liège, who have just been promoted back to the second division. After all, they bring Reno Wilmots, one of the sons of the former Belgian national coach and ex-Schalke “battle pig” Marc Wilmots. On the following Friday, in Düren, they will face their German neighbors Alemannia Aachen from the Regionalliga West. On July 8th, Kohfeldt will appear in the Kehrweg Stadium for the first time against league rivals SC Charleroi. In between, a training camp is planned with the new squad at the facilities of the Royal Belgian Football Association in Tubize near Brussels.
Florian Kohfeldt announced play-off 2 as the sporting goal for the 2023/24 season, which starts on July 28, i.e. a place in the table between seven and twelve. “That’s an ambitious goal,” he admits. “In the long run, it’s about developing a certain game identity for me. You should know what the club stands for. Already after the first training session I had the feeling that we would have a lot of fun.”
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