New Head of Coaching Education to arrive from German Football Association

The vastly experienced Daniel Jörg, who has spent 17 years working for the German Football Association, has taken over the leadership of Hungarian coach education at MLSZ.

In August 2011 the MLSZ executive committee agreed to follow a 10-year strategy lasting until the end of 2020 which is designed to completely revamp Hungarian football. In the last five years more than 800 pitches have been built and over 1800 redeveloped by MLSZ and there are over 200,000 children participating in the OTP Bank Bozsik programme.

Besides the development of participation figures and infrastructure, an improvement in the level of professional football coaching was also necessary so that domestically the technical abilities and youth education would work according to highest European norms and Hungary’s football talents would receive the required tutelage from qualified coaches in suitable circumstances in order to develop. The appointment now of Mr Jörg from the German Football Association (DFB) to lead the coaching education department gives new impetus to the development of human resources within the sport.

65 year-old Daniel Jörg has assisted the DFB with their work for most of the last two decades, first being responsible for the coaching of young footballers at the U15 and U17 levels while overseeing the coaching methods used by the national team’s goalkeeping coaches. The former keeper who once appeared in a European Cup Winners’ Cup final had led the national association’s talent scouting and identification programme since 2004 while also assuming responsibility for goalkeeper coaching education, therefore playing an active role in the renaissance of German football which culminated the country becoming world champions in 2014.

“I am very happy to take up this task in Hungary”, Mr Jörg said to www.mlsz.hu. “Although I have decades of experience at the German association, I hold that my first and most important task after my arrival in Hungary will be to familiarise myself with the environment, the current system and those working within it so that I can get my ideas across and together we can designate the direction of the development. One thing is certain; I do not want to simply apply the solutions used in German football here in Hungarian football”, Mr Jörg continued as he explained his reasons for taking up the role.

“In talent-spotting and coaching education my work at the DFB would soon be finished and my tasks would then only revolve around coaching goalkeeper coaches. We Germans say that ‘it’s a good thing to look through the fence’ and so I said to myself that I would like to come to know a new country, a new football culture. I believe we can learn a lot from each other after we come to know each other’s visions. It is necessary to be open to new approaches to work, not just from each other but from other sports too”, explained Mr Jörg who will return to Hungary after the festive period to start his work and agree with the Hungarian Football Federation on a precise timetable to carry out his work in 2017.