‘All I want in life’s a little bit of love to take the pain away,” sang Jason Pierce in the opening line of Spiritualized’s 1997 opus Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. And just a little bit has always been all Wolfsburg have been likely to get. One of a couple of special cases in the Bundesliga, a factory team derided by fans of other clubs for their lack of ‘realness’, with their matchups with Bayer Leverkusen only spared the previous epithet of ‘El Plastico’ in recent years due to Hoffenheim and RB Leipzig joining the elite on a quasi-permanent basis.
And here they are now floating in space, neither the most hated team by opposing teams’ ultras who consider them inauthentic (that would be either of the two above) nor the best funded by a corporate (that would be Leipzig). Rampantly successful over the last few years, Leverkusen are more comfortable in their own skin and have the wit to lean into how they have commonly been perceived; their club shop sells T-shirts with the legend ‘keine tradition seit 1904’.
Wolfsburg, meanwhile, go into the international break back at square one, or perhaps not even that far forward after their latest defeat, their seventh in eight games in all competitions, at Werder Bremen on Friday night. So the craziest assist of the season – Victor Boniface’s overhead kick attempt slicing way up in the air and dropping for Samuel Mbangula to volley in Bremen’s stoppage time winner – gave way to the strangest stat of the season so far. With Paul Simonis fired as coach on Sunday evening, it meant three Bundesliga coaches have been sacked this season – and like Erik ten Hag and the former Borussia Mönchengladbach manager Gerardo Seoane before Simonis, fired directly after coming a cropper against Werder Bremen.
Paul Simonis lasted just 10 league games in charge of Wolfsburg. Photograph: Action Press/Shutterstock
It would have stung a little more that it was Werder that provided the final blow, with the northern club’s social media account spending the day leading up to Friday’s game leaning on the sore point of a perceived lack of personality on their social media. One Instagram post entitled ‘Who Is The Original?’ used a series of slides on the ‘same, but different’ theme to underline points of connection – the green and white colours, carrying a ‘W’ on the badge, even the playmaker Diego having tenures at both clubs (and it made a point of showing the Brazilian lifting the DfB Pokal as a Werder player). It may be considered lighthearted from a distance but rubbishing a club’s very identity is really anything but, particularly in the Bundesliga.
So what builds identity? Capturing the imagination of neutrals is certainly a start but since the 2009 side that swept to a maiden title on the back of the goals of Edin Dzeko and Grafite, Wolfsburg have rarely looked like doing that (those two strikers, instructively, remain the club’s two top scorers of all time, with Wout Weghorst just behind Grafite). Perhaps the closest they have come to doing so was with Dieter Hecking’s 2015 Pokal-winning side, led by Kevin De Bruyne and which ruined Jürgen Klopp’s Dortmund farewell in the final.
It has not been for lack of investment in the intervening periods. Instead instability has been the problem. Oliver Glasner, who has gone on to further gild his reputation since leaving directly after leading Wolfsburg into the Champions League, left in 2021. There have been five permanent coaches since then, including Niko Kovac and Ralph Hasenhüttl – not budget choices. So maybe it’s not all down to the coach, even if this latest reign ended with Wolfsburg weakly ceding a lead in the closing minutes at Werder.
Edin Dzeko and Grafite fired Wolfsburg to the Bundesliga title in 2009. Photograph: Stuart Franklin/Bongarts/Getty Images
For when the tale of the tape is told, Simonis is unlikely to have much of the blame apportioned to him – or, you might say, much of a role at all, having lasted just 10 league games. The Dutchman always seemed an awkward fit coming off just a year as a senior head coach, albeit a very successful year in leading Go Ahead Eagles to triumph in the Dutch cup and into Europe. There was always the suspicion that a relatively inexperienced coach would struggle to impose method or authority on a club where pressure is internal rather than external but still very much present, where tens of millions are invested by Volkswagen every year and a return of some sort is expected – a less glamorous Monaco, if you like.
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Eintracht Frankfurt 1-0 Mainz, Stuttgart 3-2 Augsburg, Freiburg 2- 1 St Pauli, Borussia Mönchengladbach 3-1 Cologne, Hamburg 1-1 Dortmund, Hoffenheim 3-1, RB Leipzig, Bayer Leverkusen 6-0 Heidenheim, Union Berlin 2-2 Bayern Munich, Werder Bremen 2-1 Wolfsburg.
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Even post-Simonis the bloodletting is unlikely to be finished, with mounting speculation that the chief executive, Peter Christiansen, and the sporting director, Sebastian Schindzielorz, could be next to go. They, after all, have their responsibility for the expensively assembled but unbalanced squad that the now ex-coach inherited, with Christian Eriksen brought in when they were already well stocked in central midfield positions, big-money signings like Lovro Majer performing short of expectation and the key attacking conduit Mohamed Amoura being made to stay despite a clear keenness to move in the summer.
A full sweeping restructure will not be pretty, and may even condemn Wolfsburg to a season of struggle – it has been suggested that the interim choice to replace Simonis, the under-19 coach, Daniel Bauer, might be there for the foreseeable, much like the Eugen Polanski situation at Mönchengladbach. Christiansen certainly suggested that when he described Bauer’s appointment as “until further notice”. Maybe a big change is exactly what the club needs though, to work out what it is and what it wants to be in this post-Leipzig world, and to put an end to it just floating in Bundesliga space.
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Talking points
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If Bauer wants to feel optimistic about the future he could do worse than look at Polanski, who is expected to sign a permanent deal as head coach of Gladbach during the international break following a third straight win – and a crucial one, 3-1 in the derby against Cologne. Polanski himself was keen to point out that he is in no hurry (“I already work for the club,” he emphasised. “I’m not doing this for free”) but he deserves the gig; and with this win, remarkably, moving Gladbach out of the bottom six this might be the season to let him build, with such a cluster of below-par teams at the bottom.
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At the other end of the scale, a post-Champions League-weary Bayern Munich finally lost their 100% record in Berlin but it could have been worse, with Harry Kane scoring a 93rd-minute equaliser to salvage a draw at Union after Danilho Doekhi’s double. With their potential challengers stumbling there was little lost for Bayern, with Borussia Dortmund conceding an equaliser in the seventh minute of stoppage time at Hamburg (with Gregor Kobel and Julian Ryerson rowing about it in the tunnel afterwards) which in turn allowed Leipzig to remain second despite a 3-1 reverse at Hoffenheim, as they unravelled despite taking the lead through the red-hot Yan Diomande inside the opening 10 minutes.
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It has been a good week for Leverkusen too, with a 6-0 demolition of Heidenheim following the Champions League win at Benfica. Their state of flux is allowing the next line of potential leaders to emerge with the teenager Ibrahim Maza, who scored twice, making the most of injuries to establish himself.
