Fredi Bobic has to leave Hertha BSC early after turbulent, sportingly completely unsatisfactory times. One of his final acts as manager of the Crisis Club is to threaten a reporter.
The then Hertha managing director Fredi Bobic reacted angrily to a reporter’s question in an interview immediately after the renewed derby defeat against Union Berlin (0: 2). “If you ask again, you’ll get a scrub,” said the 51-year-old as he left an RBB reporter. The broadcaster published the video on Facebook, and the program “Zeigler’s wonderful world of football” picked it up. There you can see how the reporter, before a subsequent interview with Union coach Urs Fischer, when asked what had happened, said: “Don’t ask me, I’ll get a smack from Fredi Bobic.”
Bobic has since apologized for the incident. “I’m very sorry, I reacted too emotionally. That was just a saying, which of course wasn’t meant that way. Please don’t overrate that in football shortly after a game,” he told the “Bild” newspaper. Bobic, who was relieved of his posts at Hertha shortly thereafter after the sporting failures, was apparently bothered by the repeated question about coach Sandro Schwarz’s job security. Bobic had previously expressed his confidence in the coach several times. When asked “Can you understand that there is a coach discussion from the outside?” he answered curtly: “No”.
As in previous years, the club from the West End of Berlin is deep in the relegation battle after the last three defeats. With 14 points, Hertha is in 17th place. After successful years at Eintracht Frankfurt, Bobic only took over the sporting command at Hertha BSC in the summer of 2021. Last year, relegation could only be avoided in the relegation against Hamburger SV, now the capital club is even on a direct relegation zone. In April 2021, Bobic, who was still working for Eintracht Frankfurt at the time, was asked whether his contract in Berlin was also valid for the second division: “If you want to know exactly, it also applies to the second division,” he said back then at Sky. Now that doesn’t matter anymore.