From the 5h division to the Bundesliga: The great Saved game by Frank Schmidt
Sometime in the mid-2000s, fate led me to become the manager of Wrexham. Back then, the club was competing in the Fourth Division, and most people were unaware of its existence, as Ryan Reynolds was still an up-and-coming actor who hadn’t yet made it big. Through hard work, extensive study, and leveraging my many years of experience on the sidelines of European football, I initially managed to keep the team in the Football League and gradually turned it into a rising force in the lower divisions. Together, we climbed from the Fourth Division to the Third, then to the Championship, and about 15 years later, we made history by reaching the Premier League. The fans loved me, the chairman adored me, other clubs coveted me, and I was savoring the nectar of success. All of this, of course, took place in Football Manager and in my imagination.
Around the same time I was slowly but steadily rewriting Wrexham’s history from my room, somewhere in southern Germany, Frank Schmidt was approaching the end of his playing career. A career that hadn’t seen much excitement, with its peak being a brief stint in the Second Division with Alemannia Aachen.
In the summer of 2007, the 33-year-old defender hung up his boots for good after a final successful stint in the lower leagues as captain of his hometown team, then still called Heidenheimer. For the first time in nearly 15 years, Schmidt could fully dedicate himself to his family before starting the process of looking for a new job. However, the domestic tranquility he might have imagined didn’t last long.
In early autumn of 2007, the officials from his hometown club reached out to him. Due to a new regulation from the German Football Association, the multi-sport club Heidenheimer, which had various departments for different sports, needed to separate from its football team. This led to the formation of Heidenheim as a distinct entity that year. However, problems arose in the very first month of its operation. The team started the season poorly and, by mid-September, was left without a coach. Frank Schmidt neither had a coaching license nor any experience on the sidelines, nor a burning desire to become a coach. But he knew the team, his former teammates, and the area well, and he had proven his leadership qualities as a captain. So, he was considered the right choice “temporarily, for a week or two, until we find a proper coach.”
Schmidt considered the offer and realized he didn’t have anything better to do at the time (“I had promised my wife that since I was no longer playing football, I would take over mowing the lawn on weekends, but plans changed”), so he accepted the proposal. Heidenheim won both of those games, and the “two weeks” quickly turned into “stay on until the winter break; by then, we’ll surely have found someone else.” Winter came, Heidenheim continued their upward trajectory, and no one believed they needed to look for a better coach anymore.
The final hurdle to formalizing this “marriage” was Schmidt’s close circle, as the initial plan after his retirement was for him to take a position at an insurance company founded by a good friend of his. “It may sound simple, but it wasn’t easy,” said the team’s president at the time. “Frank was determined not to let his friend down because he had given him his word. We had to plead with the person he was going to work with to convince him that it wouldn’t be a problem.” The appeals for the good of the hometown team worked, and Schmidt’s friend agreed to wait a little longer for this… coaching experiment to play out. Sixteen years later, Schmidt is still there.
In his first year as a coach, during Heidenheim’s inaugural season as an independent football club, Schmidt led the team to promotion to the fourth division. The following season, the successes continued as the club finished first in the southern regional league, securing a spot in the third division. At just 35 years old, Schmidt had already achieved two promotions in two years of his coaching career with a team that had never reached such heights before. Remarkably, he accomplished all this without even having a coaching license at the time (which he eventually obtained in 2011).
In the third division, the level of difficulty increased significantly. Despite their excellent momentum, Heidenheim remained a weak team from a relatively obscure town of 50,000 inhabitants, with a stadium that was… modest, the kind you’d typically find in rural Greece. As Schmidt recalls, back then there was only a small main stand that could barely accommodate a few hundred people, along with a refreshment stand known for its famous fries, which still stands today (“to constantly remind us where we started”) since the stand was built around it! “The rest of the stadium was open, so you could sometimes see donkeys wandering around in a nearby field.”
After a few years of adapting and solidifying their place in the division, promotion to the 2. Bundesliga finally came. In the spring of 2014, Heidenheim finished top of the table, well ahead of the runners-up. The team’s coach had already become a local hero, and without hesitation, the management offered him a contract extension until 2020. Despite numerous offers from other clubs in the division, Schmidt refused to enter any negotiations. He was in his element, working at a stadium just a few kilometers from the house where he was born, and he was the protagonist of a beautiful football story that was still unfolding. Perhaps most importantly, he had built a team precisely as he wanted, with a core group of players who understood exactly what he demanded and how he wanted them to play. Every new addition seamlessly fit into the solid backbone of the squad, and the system ran like clockwork without the management needing to make any financial overreach that could jeopardize the entire effort. The players who passed through his hands speak highly of his personality, the relationships he develops with each player, and how much he helped them improve as footballers. Thanks to his coaching, several of them moved from the obscurity of the lower divisions to Bundesliga clubs in recent years.
The most encouraging aspect was that the work being done continued to yield results, even in a more demanding environment. Despite being newcomers to the division, Heidenheim never faced the threat of relegation during their nine-year stay in the 2. Bundesliga. Quite the opposite: in five of those nine seasons, they finished in the top six, with the highlight being the 2019-20 season when they reached the promotion playoffs. They faced Werder Bremen, the 16th-placed team in the Bundesliga, secured a 0-0 draw away but missed out on promotion by the slimmest of margins (translation: away goals rule). In the return leg in Heidenheim, the thriller ended 2-2, with three of the four goals coming in the final minutes.
Three years later, however, stoppage time would prove to be an ally. Heading into the final matchday in May, Schmidt’s team was sitting in second place, one point ahead of Hamburg and three points behind league leaders Darmstadt. A win at Jahn Regensburg would be enough to secure second place and clinch promotion. But if they slipped up and Hamburg won, they would be forced into another playoff. By the 57th minute, they were trailing by two goals. As the match entered stoppage time, the score was 2-1, and it seemed their hopes for direct promotion had vanished. Meanwhile, miles away, Hamburg’s long-suffering fans stormed the pitch, celebrating their anticipated return to the Bundesliga. What happened next is certainly remembered by all Sombrero readers. With two goals in the 93rd and 99th minutes, Heidenheim turned the game around, secured promotion, sent Hamburg to the playoffs, and ultimately won the league title on a tiebreaker, as Darmstadt lost their final match.
Sixteen years after taking on a role he never imagined he’d have, Frank Schmidt led the modest club from his hometown to the Bundesliga for the first time in its history. Through astute management and signings of players who viewed the club as a stepping stone to bigger things, the 49-year-old coach has cemented his place in the city’s history and in the hearts of its residents—and beyond.
Heidenheim’s stadium now boasts stands on all sides and a capacity of 15,000, though it remains the smallest in the Bundesliga (plans are already underway to expand it to accommodate 25,000 spectators)
Recently, the club’s president revealed to journalists that he had offered Schmidt a lifetime contract (essentially a blank check where Schmidt could fill in all the terms himself) and proposed erecting a statue of him outside the stadium. Schmidt politely declined the first offer, though that doesn’t mean he’s contemplating leaving. Currently, he is the longest-serving coach in the Bundesliga (for comparison, Schalke has had… 22 coaches in the same period!), and soon, he will surpass Volker Finke, who holds the record with just over 16 years as Freiburg’s coach from 1991 to 2007. “Honestly, I’m not concerned about the record and don’t feel any particular pride about it,” Schmidt says. “I enjoy every day I’m here and focus on the next challenge we face, which right now is our first games in the Bundesliga. I don’t want to dwell on the past. I know it’s a long time—I’ve been doing this for nearly a third of my life—but this isn’t an individual achievement. I’m surrounded by a team of people who support me, help me, and do everything to ensure I don’t get bored after all these years.”
When it comes to the idea of erecting a statue in his honor, Schmidt refuses to even entertain the discussion. “Absolutely not. I don’t like the thought that, at some point, people will start pissing on it,” he replied in a recent press conference, sixteen years after he initially agreed to put his friend’s job offer on hold to become the coach of his hometown team. “Just temporarily, for a week or two, until we find someone more permanent.”
