“What people who hire coaches sometimes don’t understand is that the personality of the coach is super important as well. Look at the personality of the coach. Is he a winner or is he a nice guy who brings you to a certain level and then it is over?”
Lehmann is considering a career in management. He feels he knows what it takes to win having had to fight his way up from the cinder pitches of his childhood to make his Schalke debut as a teenager. He knows that along the way he attracted a reputation for being difficult and he does not deny that he was – because that was the price of surviving as a professional in his younger years.
“Inside a football team people thought the same [about me] but after a while they changed their minds, they thought, ‘Okay, he is difficult but he helps me to win’,” Lehmann says. “The difference between winning and losing is that losing is very easy. You don’t need to do a lot to lose. You don’t have to practice a lot. You don’t need to argue with your team-mates. You don’t need to argue with the coach. You don’t need to command a lot, to challenge a lot. When you lose it’s nice and it’s no effort. Everyone can lose. You do nothing – you lose. But you are a nice loser.
“You want to win? It’s the opposite. You have to do a lot. You have to talk a lot, you have to argue a lot, you have to discuss, you have to dispute a lot. That takes time and energy but it is worth it and along the way it creates friction.”
It was that drive which propelled him to become Germany’s No 1 relatively late in his career. The way in which he and Kahn were pitted against each other pre-2006, often standing yards apart in stadium mixed zones making their case to journalists like politicians, was, he writes in his autobiography, “a grotesque drama”.