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Christian Gross has spent half his life as a soccer coach. Now he has announced his resignation.
Christian Gross has enough. In “sportpanorama”, the Zurich native announced his resignation from the coaching business on Sunday night: “I decided that I basically stopped training, that I am no longer going to the field.”
So Al-Ahli is still the last club Gross coached. The 65-year-old man was fired on February 21 during his third engagement with the Saudi club.
The successful coach leaves a back door open despite the resignation. “Never say never,” says Gross. “If there was, there would be engagement abroad. I definitely don’t want to rule it out.”
Bald as a trademark
Christian Gross in Al-Ahli two weeks before his release.
Keystone
6 times Swiss champions
With Gross, the most successful Swiss club manager says goodbye. The son of the Zurich-Höngg police won no less than 15 titles in his 32-year career, most of them in Switzerland.
With the Grasshoppers (1995, 1996) and FC Basel (2002, 2004, 2005, 2008), Gross won the championship cup 6 times. Only Austrian Karl Rappan and German (and also Swiss since 1980) Helmut Benthaus with 7 titles each were more successful in the highest Swiss league.
In addition, Gross won the Cup 5 times with GC and Basel and 4 times reached the Champions League. The Zurich native was voted Swiss Coach of the Year 9 times, a lonely record.
Drinks in Saudi Arabia and Egypt
Gross also had success abroad: with Al-Ahli, he won the Saudi championship (2016) and two different cup titles. And during his brief engagement in Egypt, Gross won the Confederation Cup, the African equivalent of the Europa League, with Zamalek SC (2019).
There were also layoffs
Despite this success, Gross was released in Egypt after almost a year. The same fate happened to him after a comparable period of time in Tottenham (1998), VfB Stuttgart (2010) and the Young Boys (2012).
As a pioneer in the Bundesliga
Later as a coach, Gross had also been active as a player at many clubs. Between 1972 and 1988 he kicked in Switzerland for GC, Lausanne, Xamax, St. Gallen, Lugano and Yverdon.
Y: Gross, who once played for Nati, was one of the first Swiss to move to the Bundesliga. In the 1980/81 season he played 29 games for Bochum and scored 4 goals.
