After Kühbauer-Aus: Rapid Vienna – The devil drinks can
The devil drinks dose. Rapid Wien has seen itself in the last decade through a religiously celebrated rejection of the peckish art product Red Bull Salzburg. The green and white narrative version reads: In Salzburg they have submitted to disgraceful commerce, while Rapid, as a traditional club, remains true to a noble ideal. While it smells of plastic in Salzburg, it smells of wet lawn and sweaty clothes in Vienna-Hütteldorf.
Trainer Dietmar Kühbauer summed up this mindset. As a player, Kühbauer was a fighter who straddled and roared. Its mere presence evokes kitschy memories of the heroic European Cup battles of the 1990s. The dismissal of the club legend IS not business as usual, it hits Rapid at the most vulnerable point: Anyone who positions themselves as a family in a professionalized and scientifically based business does not like to see the head of the family fail.
All that remains is Kühbauer’s buddy Zoran Barisic, also a European Cup hero of the 1990s, who tries hard to act as sports director, ex-player Gerry Willfurth, who is supposed to provide the men in suits and ties with expertise in the presidium – and the green and white football god of the 2000s Steffen Hofmann, who, together with Thomas Hickersberger, the son of the penultimate Rapid master trainer Josef Hickersberger, is looking after the team on an interim basis.