Thanks to a chairman criticising him on club forums and a constant shifting in the boardroom, Thomas Frank the manager was shaped at Brøndby
thesefootballtimes.co
Notice any similarities with us....... History repeating itself
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Going into his sophomore year at Brøndby, which also happened to be the season that the club would celebrate its 50th anniversary, expectations grew. The young players now had a year under the belt as first-teamers, and Jan Bech Andersen splurged in the transfer window.
Brøndby broke the club’s transfer record when Daniel Agger returned home from Liverpool to finish his career, and with him came club legend Johan Elmander, who was a part of the 2004/05 double-winning squad under Michael Laudrup. Officially, the goal was to finish in the top three, but internally, the expensive, big-name signings meant that the team should challenge for the title.
The significant investment in the squad didn’t help much on the pitch, though. Brøndby were easily dismantled during Europa League qualification by a skilled Club Brugge side that won 5-0 on aggregate. At home, things weren’t much better.
Although Brøndby enjoyed an early-season victory at home against København, inconsistent results were commonplace. The team managed to play three games against newly-promoted Hobro IK, a semi-professional outfit with no prior Superliga experience, without winning. It negated all the good work against their biggest rivals.
Whilst it was clear that Frank wanted to control possession with his 4-2-3-1 formation, Brøndby barely created any chances. Even against the worse teams in the league, it was a fight to score goals, and when it happened, it often seemed like it was more down to the individual class of the players rather than the strategy working as intended.
On the sidelines, Frank often looked helpless, and while he was generally well-liked amongst the fans because of his communication skills and modern leadership style, cracks began appearing in the foundations.
On the Sydsiden Stand, home of the most dedicated and vocal fans, the optimistic and cheerful Brøndby chants were slowly exchanged in favour of more pessimistic and negative tomes from the club’s tumultuous period of fighting relegation a few years earlier. Questions were raised about Frank’s ability to lead a big club like Brøndby and to motivate the experienced stars.
These questions became even louder during the winter break when Brøndby played a friendly against Hoffenheim in Germany. The Danes lost 7-0, while the press revealed that Frank needed advice from Agger on how to handle the embarrassment and punish the team, which damaged his standing among the players.
After Agger retired, he spoke about the discussion he had with Frank on that day in Germany. ‘You know that we have spoken about consequences and those things. So what are you going to do now?’ he asked Frank. “We lost 7-0 and a lot of guys didn’t perform well enough. Maybe we aren’t in shape, but it was also mentally that we were wrong.”
Agger suggested that Frank should call the players back to the training pitch during the upcoming days off. Frank was hesitant to follow the advice, seemingly unsure about demanding too much, to which Agger responded: “Of course you can. It is the only way people will understand. If I was coach, I would tell the players that they should show up in the morning. Only bring running shoes and we’ll go to the Brøndby woods.”
Frank eventually followed the advice from his captain, but his soft style was not well-liked among the players, which Agger later spoke about. “As a person I really liked Thomas Frank, but as a coach, he wasn’t the one I liked the most,” Daniel Agger said in 2017 when asked by Ekstra Bladet. “I am from the old school, where a football team has to be built around discipline and a hierarchy, but it wasn’t like that at all when I returned to Brøndby,” he recalled.
Brøndby went to finish third in the league, officially meeting the goal set out before the season, but it wasn’t in an impressive manor. The proud club finished 16 points behind FC Midtjylland and managed just 43 goals in 33 league games."
