Joe Enochs: the US coach leading a charge in the German league

Unlikely relegation contenders have become a feature of recent Bundesliga campaigns. Jürgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund side flirting with the trapdoor during the 2014-15 season is one dramatic example while Werder Bremen and Hamburger SV, down in the trenches during the current campaign, are also in trouble. The former USA international Joe Enochs watches these pressure cooker scenarios from his perch near the top of Germany’s third division with relish.

To be fair, Enoch’s own resume includes a few of them. VfL Osnabrück, the club he represented for the majority of his playing career, were a yo-yo club for most of the 12 years he spent wearing the club’s purple and white. A small provincial outfit located in the northwest of the country, in his time the club known as Lila-Weiß—the Lilywhites—regularly flitted between the second and third divisions (they have yet to reach the top tier in their history).

Yet a reckoning might be in store for Enochs and his adopted hometown club. The Californian is now at the Osnabrück helm, leading them on a charge over the last 18 months that has them challenging for promotion.

It turns out, though, Enochs is in no mood for promotion talk. For one thing, there are 15 more games to play and Enochs is weighing the impact of injuries to some of his leading players. Still, Enochs enthuses about the promotion and relegation system, one that is foreign to many Americans. “Being over here so long, I can’t fathom a football league that doesn’t go up and down, where there’s no relegation,” he says. “I love the American sports. I love basketball, I love baseball, I love football, I love watching those games. But you get to games at the end of the season and it doesn’t matter.”

The notion of promotion and relegation remains a hot topic in the United States. One without a conclusive answer and, for some, a satisfactory end. At this point, it looks highly unlikely that the meritocratic model will be instituted in the foreseeable future. US Soccer president Sunil Gulati recently poured a fresh stream of cold water over the idea, citing a number of reasons prefaced by the financial considerations of club investors who bought into a system without it.

Enochs sees both sides but leans towards promotion and relegation: he thinks the system develops players at a faster rate. “I don’t know if they develop better but it puts a lot more pressure on the game. You can’t lose five games in a row, you just can’t do it. If there’s no relegation you can do it and it’s fine. Maybe the coach will get fired, maybe you don’t get a contract for the next season, but the club’s going to be able to live and survive and they’ll be there next year playing in the same league.”

Enochs’ contract is up at the season’s end and football can be a fickle beast but he’s sure of one thing: “My goal is to coach at the highest level possible.” As an American in Europe, that’s a tough ask. Witness the recent travails of Bob Bradley with Swansea City in the Premier League. Enochs expresses disappointment at an outcome that saw Bradley last just 11 games before being dismissed. On the other hand, there is David Wagner. The German-American is the head coach at Huddersfield Town, who are currently third in England’s Championship. The impressive work of Wagner at Huddersfield somewhat flies under the radar Stateside. Though a former US international, he was born and played his entire career in Germany. That might also mean he doesn’t carry the baggage of the American coach tag. And therein, perhaps, lies the key to the success of an American manager in Europe. Could the likes of Enochs and Steve Cherundolo, a youth coach at Hannover 96, as German-educated coaches and respected veteran players of the game there, sneak in the back door as quasi-Europeans? Enochs hedges. Maybe. “I don’t know if I’m carrying around that baggage but I know that Bob Bradley did.”

The genesis of Enochs’ career suggests he is well prepared for the art of the hardscrabble, the anonymity of the outsider. When Enochs arrived in Germany in the early 1990s, he did so without a club, staying with a former college team-mate until an opportunity popped up. These were early days for American players in Europe, who were seen as technically deficient but high on work ethic. Enoch muses that Americans presented a cheaper version of the English ideal. So it was that Enochs finally caught on with St Pauli’s second string and from 1996 would go on to stack up a VfL Osnabrück record for appearances. Neither would he have labored under many illusions of the realities of the management game: he played for 11 coaches in his 12 years at Osnabrück.

As head coach today, he looks over an Osnabrück team he has gradually constructed over the last year-and-a-half and sees a work in progress. He took charge near the beginning of last season when the club was at a low ebb. He would eventually lead the Lilywhites to fifth but this year the team is unmistakably his own. Thus far the prize remains within reach. “I don’t want to put my foot too far out of the door,” says the 45-year-old, emphasizing a game-to-game philosophy in a league he describes as evenly matched more or less from top to bottom. “We are in a good position right now but it’s still really close for us.” Wise words. Osnabrück had just lost a tight game to Mainz 05 II, the division’s bottom club, and shortly after speaking to the Guardian his charges went down 3-0 to fellow promotion chasers Magdeburg, in the process trading places near the top.

Which is where Enochs the coach steps in. They’re overdue a promotion, he admits. But there are caveats. “Going up to stay in the second division would be probably just as difficult as going up this season – maybe even more difficult.” Osnabrück see themselves as a traditionally second division club because that’s where they’ve spent most of their near 120-year history. With an average home gate of 9,800 and a stadium to match, the lower half of the second tier might be where they belong, he says. But Osnabrück limp on with an achilles heel: training infrastructure that lags behind the opposition.

Enochs never did play professionally in the US, leaving before the advent of MLS. Germany has been good to him, he says, providing him his Osnabrück-born-and-raised wife and a welcoming setting in which to raise a family. Lately, he’s been taking solace from the sympathetic position of German leader Angela Merkel amid the fallout from the immigration ban on seven predominantly Muslim countries set forth by the leader of his own country, President Donald Trump. He has a number of players who are Muslim. He’s embarrassed. He’s in the midst of a promotion push but ponders something bigger than the game. “I’ve sent four or five youth players over to the United States to play in college. Now there hasn’t been a Muslim player among them.” It’s the destiny of those Muslim players who might go, who otherwise qualify, that vexes him. It’s a big, unanswered question. Like the destiny of VfL Osnabrück.