The Hertha Horror

The rot at Hertha, if you want to call it that, first showed last May, even though the team from the German capital was third in the league and only one point off the top of the table.

A huge amount was riding on the team's final two, eminently winnable matches of the season. If Hertha qualified for the Champions League, the club would have the cash to retain stars like defender Joe Simunic and striker Andriy Voronin. If not, a rebuilding process would have to begin.

Then coach Lucien Favre rolled the dice with a pair of controversial personnel moves. He chose not to re-insert captain Arne Friedrich, who was coming back from injury, into the starting back four. And he benched Voronin, eligible once more after a suspension, in favor of Marko Pantelic, the mercurial Serb with whom Favre had a running personal feud.

That left Friedrich a sullen bystander as the team he had skippered for years tried to ascend to the top level of European club football. And Voronin, on loan from Liverpool, could only watch as Pantelic - a player Favre intended to boot out of Berlin - helped determine whether his own future would be in Merseyside or the German capital.

A lone win would have been enough top secure a Champions League berth, but Hertha earned only a point from those two games (Hertha was blown out 4-0 at Karlsruhe in the other) and finished fourth. Simunic, Voronin and Pantelic were as good as gone, and management was about to embark on a series of grave miscalculations.

Diminished expectations

While fans in Berlin were celebrating a better-than-expected 2008-9 campaign, the board of directors was busy dismissing long-time commercial and sporting director Dieter Hoeness. The onetime Bayern striker had been with the club for more than a decade and had built up the squad, but had also come under criticism over that time for overspending on underperforming Brazilian forwards and failing to establish the club among Germany's elite.

Werner Gegenbauer took over the financial side of Hoeness' job and announced that Hertha's priority would be to reduce the approximately 25 million euros of debt his predecessor had racked up - and not necessarily to improve on last season's successes.

Michael Preetz, a former striker who holds the record for most goals by a Hertha player, was given the task, together with Favre, of finding affordable replacements for a trio of departed mainstays.

Hertha was charting a contradictory and, in retrospect, ill-advised course. Divorcing itself from Hoeness meant the club lost valuable contacts on the international transfer market at precisely the time when Berlin needed big value for small money.

Hertha's off-season transfer haul was correspondingly meager: a journeyman midfielder who promptly broke his foot, two inexperienced defenders, a no-name forward from Colombia and Artur Wichniarek, a striker who had already spent two unsuccessful years in Berlin and was hated by the clubs' fans.

Worst-case scenario

Hertha's first five league matches were decided by a single goal - nothing new for a team that had risen in the table by eking out close wins. The difference was Berlin was now on the losing end of the nail-biters.

Part of the reason was bad luck, part was a drop in the quality of the squad, and part may well have been a loss of motivation among the players after management prioritized budget cuts over title bids.

Still Hertha had reason to expect their luck to even out, and for some close decisions to go their way. Unfortunately there was a gaping hole in the squad that no one seemed to have noticed.

If Hertha owed their 2008-9 success to any one player in particular, it was goalkeeper Jaroslav Drobny, who had recorded the best saves-to-shots ratio in the Bundesliga. Since that position was so well filled, no one in Berlin paid much attention when Drobny's back-up Christopher Gäng went down with an injury at the beginning of the season.

But in mid-September, the Czech keeper got hurt in a Europa League match. His replacement was 19-year-old Sascha Burchert, who had previously minded the posts for Hertha's amateur development side in the fourth division.

Burchert was forced to move up three divisions immediately and anchor a defense that had lost its top performer from the previous season. A struggling squad was going to have to pull together to avoid disaster.

One big unhappy family

Favre was generally regarded as a master tactician but had always had problems managing the diverse personalities in his squad. His insistence in sending Pantelic packing, for instance, had likely cost Hertha points - Berlin's new stable of strikers had yet to score a single goal in the young season.

Then, Favre's captain and defensive anchor Friedrich deserted him just when he needed him most. Hertha were demolished in their next two games thanks to grotesque lapses at the back. Both matches were essentially over in the opening minutes.

Favre's assistant later accused the squad of playing against the coach - a charge Friedrich vehemently denied. But Friedrich, who had previously admitted to carrying over mixed feelings about Favre from the previous season, was virtually invisible on the pitch during that pair of losses. Perhaps, subconsciously at least, his heart wasn't in it.

In any case, a club that had struggled became one that was plummeting.

Hertha were faced with a choice of whether to accept possible relegation as the price for balancing the books while sticking with Favre and his vision of tactical, short-passing football, or to cut their losses by bringing in a journeyman coach with experience in the task at hand - fighting for survival.

By late September, the Swiss coached hailed as a genius as recently as the previous May was gone, and Friedhelm Funkel was on the sidelines.

A historic hole

The worst team ever in the Bundesliga is considered to be Tasmania Berlin from 1965-66. The club, artificially promoted to the first division because the German Football Association wanted a team to represent the capital, racked up a record of 2 wins, 4 draws and 28 losses - or 8 points based on the old standings system in which wins were only worth two points.

As of mid-November, Hertha had only earned one point under Funkel and were rooted on four points, putting them on course to equal or even break Tasmania's record of futility.

Thanks in large measure to the return of Drobny, Hertha's defense has stabilized, but amazingly, Berlin's strikers have still failed to score a single goal in the league, and no team has ever stayed up after earning so few points in the first three months of a season.

Hertha management is once again faced with a difficult decision: whether to sacrifice the austerity program and buy in talent on credit at the winter break.

And once again, management is charting an uncertain course. Hertha is currently rumored to be trying to raise three million euros, hardly an adequate sum for the sort of reinforcements needed to make up a standings deficit of historic proportion.

The odds are that Hertha's ship is sunk, and that Germany's capital won't be seeing any first-division football next season. (That is, unless it's at Hertha's cross-town East Berlin rivals, Union Berlin, who are off to a decent start in the second division.)

Author: Jefferson Chase

Editor: Matt Hermann