The Door Opening to the DFB President's Office: Klopp's Confidant and the 1-0-0 Governance Vacuum

In January 2026, when Jürgen Klopp signed on to coach the German national team, nobody in the Frankfurt meeting room asked the simplest question: what is Marc Kosicke actually going to do? Eighteen months later the question still hangs — but there are now three official answers. DFB president Bernd Neuendorf calls Kosicke an "external employee". The federation calls him an "external adviser". Klopp, who brought him in, calls him an "assistant coach for strategy, development and innovation". Three labels, one man, no document reconciling them.

When three authoritative sources describe one role in three different ways, that is not a communication error. It is a governance vacuum kept open on purpose — and vacuums eventually get filled. I call this structure 1-0-0: one role, zero definition, zero disclosure.

This fight is taking place in a stadium with no crowd. No stands, no chanting — only internal memos and supervisory-board minutes. But applause in an empty stadium carries further than any anthem, because it is sung from memory. Here the memory is of a transparent DFB where staffing decisions do not depend on who happens to be whose friend.

Klopp did not arrive at the DFB as an ordinary coach. He was the biggest name German football could land after two disastrous World Cups and a chain of failed appointments from Joachim Löw to Hansi Flick. When the federation got him, it paid any price. Part of that price, structurally, was autonomy: Klopp did not come alone. He brought Kosicke, his long-time confidant from the Nike negotiations of the early 2000s, through Borussia Dortmund, through Liverpool, now to Frankfurt.

In England, Klopp ran things like a classic "manager" — tactics, personnel, support staff, all under his hand. At the DFB he is, on paper, just head coach of the national team. In practice he has placed his own man inside a public institution, in a job title that had never existed in the German system. There was no "assistant coach for strategy, development and innovation" anywhere in the DFB's org charts before this.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung investigation dragged the governance question out of the boardroom and into print. That is when it stopped being an argument about a job title.

The core of the issue sits in three points, all document-verifiable.

The first is the remit vacuum. Kosicke is said to have far-reaching access; many inside the DFB still do not know what he actually does. A role titled "strategy, development and innovation", sitting above conventional coaching functions, could touch the federation's long-term playing philosophy and youth-curriculum direction. But the source offers no evidence confirming that. What we do know is concrete: the remit is undefined, and the DFB supervisory board received no detailed information about Kosicke's exact responsibilities.

The second is the web of business interests. Kosicke remains a shareholder in Onside Sports GmbH, a company specialising in organising friendlies and training camps. He runs Projekt b, a firm that manages sporting directors and coaches — and, according to the reporting, those links were not disclosed to the DFB. He previously held a stake in projectFIVE, a marketing agency, and says he has had "no shares there for a year and a half".

Put those pieces together and you get a troubling structure: an adviser to the national team standing at the intersection of two markets in which the DFB itself is a buyer — match logistics (Onside Sports) and the coach-hiring market (Projekt b). The DFB is one of the largest employers in that exact market. Projekt b operates in that exact market. That is the seed of a self-dealing mechanism.

The third point, and the gravest, is not that the interests exist — it is that they were not disclosed. A declared conflict of interest is a manageable problem. An undeclared conflict of interest is a governance incident. Once a supervisory board discovers what it was not told, the question stops being what Kosicke does and becomes how the federation vetted him before letting him in.

Kosicke defends himself by saying he now focuses "exclusively on advising the DFB". That does not resolve anything. Still holding shares in Onside Sports and still running Projekt b means the interests are ongoing, not historical.

And then there is the detail that made me stop longest: Kosicke is said to have "open doors all the way up to my presidential office". In other words, his informal influence may exceed his formal, undefined remit. A role with no definition, but with a door to the man at the top of the federation. That is a structure I call personality-permeable: the organisation shaped by personal relationships rather than process.

Based on my experience tracking matches and governance stories, I recognise a familiar pattern. Loyalty-based trust always arrives first; control mechanisms always arrive later. When Klopp brought Kosicke in, the DFB made a strategic judgment: we need Klopp more than we need procedural cleanliness. That is not an irrational judgment. German football was desperate for fast reconstruction. But the cost of haste is gaps, and gaps always carry their own price.

On the industry-transmission side, two channels matter. The first is the representation ecosystem: if Kosicke both advises the national-team coach and runs a company that manages coaches and sporting directors, he sits between DFB hiring decisions and his own client pool. The second is match logistics: Onside Sports organises friendlies and training camps, overlapping directly with the DFB's own commercial function — a latent procurement conflict if the federation ever buys such services.

One thing must be said about the evidence. There are no revenue figures, no valuations, no financial documents on the scale of Kosicke's holdings. We do not know how large they are. We only know they exist, they touch relevant segments, and at least one link was not disclosed. In analysis, knowing what you do not know matters as much as knowing what you do.

Here I want to argue against myself, because I know my bias. My instinct is to side with the underdog and distrust power. But "friendly takeover" is Uli Hoeneß's phrase, and Hoeneß has his own agenda in German football. One adviser is not a takeover. One individual is not the capture of an institution. It is also fair to say Kosicke's companies may be dormant, that the DFB's disclosure thresholds may not have been crossed, and that the autonomy Klopp brought may be exactly what a battered DFB needed to revive. Understanding why does not mean accepting that it is so.

I also have to admit something, because I once got it wrong and was corrected. In 2026, I savaged Paul Pogba in a 1-0 Manchester United win, then discovered he had the team's highest pass completion and provided the assist. Since then I keep one rule: every hot take must rest on at least two self-verified data points. In the Kosicke story, the self-verified data are the company records and the silence in the disclosure file. They are not enough to convict, but enough to raise the question.

And there is a story I still tell myself whenever I get swept up in a media storm. Rashica taught me that sometimes you have to remove yourself to understand how much you love the game. Institutions are the same. You have to separate yourself from the personal ties to know whether you are loyal to the mission or to an individual. The question before the DFB is not whether Kosicke is good or bad. It is: if the supervisory board demanded full disclosure tomorrow, would this structure hold — or does it only stand because of the ambiguity?

People call me crazy for predicting the underdog will be crowned. I answer: crazy is the only way to see the future. But in a governance story, the opposite is true: sobriety is the only way to see the risk before it detonates.

There is a pattern in how football federations handle cases like this. First denial. Then "nothing to see here". Then, as pressure rises, the role gets "redefined", "formalised", "augmented with a protocol". I am betting on that central scenario: within a few months, the DFB supervisory board will force Kosicke's role into writing, with a disclosure and recusal protocol attached. No exit. Just redrawn boundaries. The worst case is restriction or termination. The best case is completed disclosure, a "cured" conflict, and a story that fades as Germany win a few games.

Here is the crux of the pressure asymmetry. Klopp retains personal goodwill — he says most people "tend to give me a bit of the benefit of the doubt". Kosicke is viewed more critically, simply because the role never existed before. The reputational cost concentrates on the adviser, not the coach. Klopp himself concedes it when he says: "People judge things before we've done anything at all." That line is an admission that no sporting evidence exists yet to settle the dispute. The battle is being fought entirely on governance and narrative turf.

What keeps this story from fading is that it feeds itself. Each new disclosure — Onside Sports, Projekt b — restarts the cycle, independent of any result on the pitch. And because it is driven by elite voices, with Hoeneß against Klopp, the media heat tends to accelerate and lengthen the news cycle. If Germany win, the story may be absorbed into a larger narrative: "Klopp knows what he is doing." If Germany lose, the governance story becomes a stick with which to beat the whole coaching regime.

So what is actually on the scales? Not a proven rule breach. No specific DFB, FIFA or UEFA statute is cited in the reporting. What is on the scales is three things combined: an undefined role, an interest network touching both match logistics and the personnel market, and a door open to the presidential office. Even with no wrongdoing, the perception alone is enough to do damage. In governance, perception is usually operational reality.

I do not think this is a major scandal. I think it is a hole exposed at the right time. And sometimes a hole exposed before results arrive is more useful than a hole kept sealed until it is too late.

Fate does not betray the man who dares tie on the scarf on the very day Manchester falls. I learned that from matches I thought I understood completely, only to realise I had it wrong. German football faces a similar question: will it dare to re-tie its procedures at the right moment, instead of waiting for the next disclosure to arrive?

My judgment, and it is testable: within six months, the DFB will publish a formal role description for Kosicke, with a transparency commitment on commercial interests. If that does not happen, or if a new disclosure about Projekt b surfaces, the story enters its next phase — and this time the man on the operating table may no longer be Kosicke, but the supervisory board that let him in without checking enough.

That is the upset I am waiting for. And like every upset, it only looks beautiful if it is real.