Unknown quantity

Take a fourth-division club, and inject some top-flight financial backing, a mild-mannered coach and handful of Bundesliga rejects. Wait a decade, and what do you get? Augsburg in the first division.

It took until the final match of the 2010-11 campaign, a 2-1 loss to Hertha Berlin, for the club from the Swabian part of Bavaria to officially book their maiden voyage in Bundesliga. And their promotion was a triumph of patience in the longer term as well.

As recently as 2002, Augsburg were playing the Bavaria League, the equivalent of today's fourth division. Since then they have slowly but surely moved up the ranks. They spent five years in division two and had to overcome the crushing disappointment of losing the promotion play-off last season.

Was club management surprised that the squad could rebound so successfully? Not really.

"What made me confident is that there is a structure and concept behind our work," commercial manager Andreas Rettig told the Welt newspaper. "The club's development is no accident since everything we do is part of a strategy. Another advantage is that we're not some sort of Vanity Fair. Everything we do is calm and collected."

The personification of that placidity is Dutch coach Jos Luhukay, a man of such extreme modesty he sometimes seems invisible. But the job he has done with a hardly illustrious cast of players this season speaks for itself.

Squad of second chances

Passionate fans of the Bundesliga will recognize a lot of the names of Augsburg's roster. Strikers Michael Thurk and Nando Raffael, defender Jan-Ingwer Callsen-Bracker and Lukas Sinkiewicz, and keeper Simon Jentzsch have all played top flight football in the past.

That experience gained by those players at teams like Leverkusen and Wolfsburg stood Augsburg in good stead this season, particularly at the back. Augsburg had the second-division's joint-best defense, and according to the grades handed out by the German football magazine kicker, Jentzsch was the competition’s top keeper.

Luhukay's up-and-down resume resembles that of many of his players. In January 2007, the Dutchman took over first-division Mönchengladbach, got relegated but then led them back up to the top flight the next season - only to get fired seven games into the following campaign.

So there's reason to fear that this team and their coach occupy a grey area between too good for division two and not quite up to the demands of the top flight.

And the uncertainty isn't made any more transparent by the thick fog surrounding the one element most crucial to any club's long-term prospects: finances.

A new Hoffenheim?

The start of Augsburg's rise at the turn of millennium coincided with the arrival of women's clothing magnate Walther Seinisch as club chairman. The club has operated at a modest loss in recent years and has needed capital injections, most probably from the chairman himself, to secure its license and construct a new stadium needed for upper-division football.

"Without Walther Seinisch, Augsburg would not be where it is today," manager Rettig told Spiegel magazine.

The story reminds many a Bundesliga fan of Hoffenheim's meteoric rise through the ranks, which was funded by software-billionaire patron Dietmar Hopp's big, big bucks.

But there are differences. Augsburg eschewed huge transfer fees and inflated player salaries in assembling its current squad, and the club's boss says that's the way things are going to stay.

"A lot of clubs started spending big money for players and other things once they got promoted, only to get themselves in trouble when they went down again," Seinisch said in an interview with the Internet sports platform Spox.com. "We need to walk the tightrope better."

So as Augburg's maiden first-division voyage approaches, the course appears to be consolidation rather than expansion. That's probably wise. Despite the club's successful second-division campaign, their state-of-the-art stadium was rarely full. Indeed, Augsburg attracted less than half the number of spectators as the other promoted team Hertha Berlin.

Despite their euphoria at getting promoted, everyone at Augsburg admits that their only goal next season will be to avoid going straight back down. With only limited means at their disposal to bolster the squad, Augsburg's first season in the top flight could also be - at least in the short term - their last.

Author: Jefferson Chase
Editor: Matt Hermann