Alex Frei becomes the new coach of FC Basel

After a turbulent season, FC Basel is heading for new shores with old champions. Former striker Alex Frei will be on the sidelines in the future.

Barely promoted with FC Winterthur, Alex Frei left Schützenwiese for Basel after just six months.

Ennio Leanza / Keystone

Both FC Basel and YB released their coaches last season and replaced them with their assistants. Patrick Frame had to give way to Guillermo Abascal in Basel and David Wagner to Matteo Vanetta in Bern. Club management hopes for short-term impulses from such measures. At least that.

But here as well as there, the change was fruitless. On the contrary. The statistics alone do not give Abascal and Vanetta good marks. On the contrary. David Degen and Christoph Spycher, who are responsible for the sport, can and must take note of this.

In one place, change is already a fact. Basel jumps back into the past, clings to old champions and emotionally charges the story. This includes Marco Streller being more closely involved in the sporting department and the retiring Valentin Stocker being designated as head of sport.

Frei is not averse to rhetorical infighting

Against this background, it is not surprising that the new coach is called Alex Frei. After the executive floor had been slimmed down and centered even more on David Degen, it quickly became clear that the club needed a coach who could keep Degen in line and who was not averse to rhetorical infighting. A counterweight. A coach who is not satisfied with just any random player. A strong voice, in the native dialect.

Alex Frei has already established himself as a strong-willed striker and has scored goals less thanks to his talent and more thanks to his instincts that others only dream of: 84 internationals, 42 goals. Or in four masterful FCB years from 2009: 103 championship games, 73 goals. He helped shape the best years of the era of President Bernhard Heusler, who will now support Degen in an advisory capacity. One adds to the other.

Frei was an excellent striker. What kind of coach is he? Immediately after his career as a footballer, he worked himself up as sports director at FC Luzern and in the end threw his pen away in frustration. After that, Frei was a youth coach in Basel at various levels and even stepped in as head coach for just over a month in 2018 after Raphael Wicky was fired. He later left the club because he no longer felt at home in Bernhard Burgener’s presidency.

It continued for him where numerous coaches who want to go up start: in the Challenge League. The tranquil FC Wil, a typical B club with limited potential, was Frei’s first stop in 2020. The season ended with the prevention of relegation. The former goal scorer did not attract much attention. In November 2021, Wil and Frei separated by “mutual agreement”.

Winterthur and Alex Frei – that was a good match

This was followed by a wondrous six months in Winterthur, a little fairy tale in an old stadium and in a city where football is lived like nowhere else in the second division. Frei felt right at home in the emotional atmosphere on the Schützenwiese, which was always easy to spot – in his behavior on the sidelines in an arena filled with 9,000 spectators, or after the match, when he made media representatives wait a little longer before the audience. Media professionals, some of whom were only there because of him.

One could well have imagined the continuation of the adventure with Alex Frei in Winterthur, but the surprising and narrowly achieved promotion to the Super League did not deter him from the next step. FC Basel is calling. Degen, Streller, Stocker and Heusler. Who knows when the next call might ring out. He’s already too loud not to hear him.

First, the too quick, bitter lesson as sports director at a moment when he was actually still a footballer. Then junior coach, interim Basel head coach and an almost two-year apprenticeship on the sidelines of the Challenge League. It’s not step by step, it also went down again. But it’s a build up.


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