What Finke did not know was that he had just talked to Achim Stocker, Freiburg’s long-serving president, and inadvertently submitted an application to become the club’s next coach. Stocker had a fearsome reputation in the game as a manager-eater of the first order. In eleven years in the second division he had sacked 17 coaches.\n\nHe had turned Freiburg into a classic one-man show.
Uli Hoeneß later remembered that Stocker even bought the stadium bratwursts himself. He drove around the villages on Sundays looking for talent because a modern scouting department was still footballing fiction.\n\nHe fought the authorities over every parking space, scraped together player salaries from friends, acquaintances and local companies, and persuaded members to set up standing orders to pay the squad. That persistence earned him the nickname “the Beggar King of South Baden.” Once, when things became really tight, he even mortgaged his own little house to help the club.
