Three Job Titles, One Governance Gap: Marc Kosicke and the Unanswered Question at the DFB

Süddeutsche Zeitung published its investigation into Marc Kosicke on an unremarkable day in German football. Yet the moment it landed, a small paradox surfaced and refused to fade: the same office in Frankfurt, the same man, and three official sources calling him three different things. DFB president Bernd Neuendorf called him an "external employee." The federation's statement called him an "external adviser." Jürgen Klopp — the man who brought him in — introduced him as "assistant coach for strategy, development and innovation." Three definitions, three tiers of authority, three levels of accountability — and not one document that defines what Kosicke actually does. In football, when a role is left undefined, its real power tends to be far greater than its outward appearance. I write about football to prove the value of people — not in the stands, but on the pitch. This time, however, the story unfolds inside a boardroom. Klopp took the Germany job after years of building his reputation at Liverpool, and from his first days, he brought Kosicke along — a man who has been by his side since the two worked with Nike in the early 2000s. The relationship rests on more than two decades of trust, and it is exactly the kind of relationship any organisation struggles to reconcile with internal control processes. The DFB supervisory board, according to the SZ investigation, received no detailed information about Kosicke's specific responsibilities. Many inside the federation remain unclear about what he actually does. During the same period, those same corners recorded a "growing irritation." This is the heart of the matter: the question is not whether Kosicke is competent, but whether a public institution is operating on principles of transparency or on the principles of a private dressing room. The wider backdrop has to be faced plainly. Germany had just come through a long cycle of disappointment, and landing Klopp was seen as a major gamble. When a federation bets on a manager with a strong personality and global prestige, it usually agrees to concede a great deal — including structural control. The position created for Kosicke is one example of that concession. What is notable is that Klopp's win here was not small: very few national-team managers can install their own confidant, without going through federation vetting, inside the operating machinery. That says his power is concentrating, not being shared. The problem sharpened when Kosicke's business interests came to light. He remains a shareholder in Onside Sports GmbH — a company specialising in organising friendlies and training camps. He runs Projekt b, a company he founded that manages sporting directors and coaches. He once held a stake in projectFIVE, a marketing agency, though he says he has had "no shares there for a year and a half." Three businesses, three sectors, and two of them — Onside Sports and Projekt b — intersect directly with the operations and decisions of the DFB. This is the classic intersection of a conflict of interest: a man who can organise friendlies, who holds coaches and sporting directors on the market, and who sits as an adviser to the national-team head coach. At the same time, according to SZ, his links to Projekt b were not disclosed to the DFB. This is no longer about personal preferences — it is a structure of interests threaded between the personnel market and the machinery of a national team. The data here is not xG, minutes played, or chance-conversion rates. The data is facts shaped by words: three different names for the same job title, one missing line in the supervisory board's file, one company name absent from the official record. In this kind of story, the smallest facts carry the greatest weight. An undefined role cannot be limited. An undisclosed conflict cannot be excluded. Looking at the international context, the prevailing standard is clear. Major football federations, from UEFA to many national associations, require senior advisers to declare material commercial interests and to recuse themselves from decisions that could conflict. The existence of interests is not the problem — the silence around them is. In Germany these rules do not quite fail to exist, but the SZ investigation shows they were not fully applied in Kosicke's case. What is missing is not the law, but the enforcement mechanism. And what is missing even more is a clear table of responsibilities for a position created to serve an individual rather than an institution. Over twenty-seven years watching this industry, I cannot recall a case where a national federation allowed an adviser with no clear title, holding direct commercial interests in the football personnel market, to sit in a position with "open doors all the way up to my presidential office." That is Kosicke's own phrase, quoted in the SZ investigation, and it inadvertently says more than he may have intended: his informal influence may run well beyond his defined scope. If a man with such influence holds companies operating in the very field he advises on, then the line between adviser and broker has been erased. But honesty toward the data matters, even when the data does not support the strongest argument. There is no evidence that Kosicke has abused his position or enriched himself. No charge of breaking a law or a statute has been filed. This is a conflict-of-interest and transparency problem, not yet a proven scandal. Distinguishing these two levels matters, because blurring them drops us into the trap of judging before the evidence — the very trap Klopp complained about when he said: "People judge things before we've done anything at all." Uli Hoeneß's accusation of a "friendly takeover" also needs to be weighed properly. One adviser is not a takeover. Overheated language dilutes attention away from the real issue — internal control processes being eroded, not a plot to seize the institution. The pitch has no room for prejudice — only the ball, the tactics, and whoever dares to stand up. Here, the one who needs to stand up is not a coach or a player, but a supervisory board with the responsibility to ask the right question at the right time. If we ignore both cautionary layers — the tendency to inflate and the tendency to defend — the real problem remains intact. Kosicke himself says he now focuses "exclusively on advising the DFB," but remaining a shareholder in Onside Sports and running Projekt b shows these interests are ongoing, not historical. This is the kind of selective self-disclosure — revealing what has been exited, concealing what is still held — that the press rarely lets rest. In twenty-seven years watching this industry, I keep seeing one thing repeat: organisations only react once a problem has become a wave. The DFB supervisory board will not be able to stay silent forever over a role that its own three sources describe differently. Accountability — at a national federation or a club — is non-negotiable. Every move is a piece of the puzzle — every piece is a life waiting to be recognised. Here, the missing piece is a line of text in the supervisory board's declaration. An open question still hangs in Frankfurt: is the value of a Klopp on the bench worth the DFB trading away part of its own control mechanism? Every organisation must choose between two paths — either rewrite the rules to fit the man, or rewrite the role to fit the rules. The DFB stands at that junction, and this time, the data is not a goal. The data is a gap that has not yet been filled in.