Almost exactly ten years ago, Dirk Schuster took over as head coach at SV Darmstadt 98.

At that time, he initially seemed to be just the next candidate who should somehow keep the disheveled traditional club above the regional league.

But the Saxon shaped a football fairy tale in southern Hesse that began on the threshold of the fourth division and culminated in May 2016 with the Bundesliga whereabouts in the Berlin Olympic Stadium.

The fact that the past decade was the most successful in the history of the Darmstadt club remains with Schuster.

The merit of the club's management is to have underpinned the unexpected high with economic prosperity, which has made the club, which is established in the upper half of the second division, fit for the future.

All of Schuster’s successor coaches after 2016 – Meier, Frings, Grammozis, Beginning – have, some more, some less, been strangers to the football location.

Hugely important trailblazers

Or didn't really get through with their personal style or their footballing approach.

Only with Torsten Lieberknecht since the summer of 2021 has there been a head coach again, with whom there is basic satisfaction at all levels in the club and the environment.

Lieberknecht combines a strong record with a popularity that Schuster couldn't match even in the best of times.

The "lilies" are now a serious candidate for promotion - and with the stadium that was completed in winter, they have another trump card up their sleeves.

Schuster and Lieberknecht are both enormously important pioneers for the flowering of the "lilies" and will face each other this Sunday (1.30 p.m. in the FAZ live ticker for the 2nd Bundesliga and on Sky) on the Betzenberg when Schuster's 1. FC Kaiserslautern on the SVD meets.

"Both of them fit or rather fit the Darmstadt conditions of their respective time quite well in terms of their type and approach," says Rüdiger Fritsch, club president for ten years, to the FAS: "Schuster did pioneering work, so to speak, in the Darmstadt adventure land at that time.

Lieberknecht found completely different working conditions, but also different expectations.”

When Schuster started, there were just a handful of employees at the office, while Lieberknecht has around 40;

Schuster once had to break off sessions due to bad weather because the training grounds were unplayable;

Lieberknecht finds an adequate practice green and a brand new functional building.

Schuster could have antiquated football based on fighting power and balls thrown long forwards played at the location without hesitation;

Lieberknecht is rightly expected to have a committed but high-quality footballing style of play.

Self-confessed football romantic

Both football coaches, the Saxon and the Palatinate, also have something in common, for example they can both have a particularly inspiring and motivating effect on their pros.

"Both of them don't pretend that they have to reinvent football every day.

Both like to build a kind of wagon camp to strengthen togetherness," says Fritsch: "Both don't want the players to go through fire for them personally, but for the common cause."

The former Lauterer Lieberknecht is a self-confessed football romantic who, during his playing and coaching career, worked at clubs where hard work came before the nice game.

But that doesn't prevent him from giving the "lilies" a modern style.

Schuster, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be able to get out of his skin.

He cultivates the perpetual, repetitive talk of little David (he and his team) having to compete against the oh so much bigger and richer Goliaths (everyone else).

That also seems to work in Lautern - the second division newcomer is in sixth place with twelve points.

Only with Schuster's second engagement in Darmstadt (December 2017 to February 2019) did it no longer work properly.

The SVD leadership had a hard time with Schuster's return campaign, when his inglorious departure to Augsburg in 2016 caused a lot of china to break internally.

In an emergency, Schuster, once again endowed with great power as a coach and sports director, managed to stay in the class, but failed with the necessary rebuilding afterwards.

The people of Darmstadt had to nibble longer on the legacy of Schuster's second term.

Because he - against the nature and the will of many players - reset the clocks to his playing style, which was only characterized by fighting and power.

At that time, Schuster had fought against Carsten Wehlmann, who had started as a sports coordinator and is now successfully working as a sports director, with all his might, which left wounds.

In any case, with a view to this best Darmstadt decade with Schuster as the starting point and Lieberknecht as the person currently responsible, President Fritsch sums it up: “With both of them one can justifiably say: the results are right.”