The many challenges facing the new Czech Republic manager Miroslav Koubek will chime with anyone who knows anything about the state of Irish football in the 21st century.
Only appointed in late December, Koubek has wasted no time preparing for the World Cup playoff against the Republic of Ireland in Prague on March 26th.
After the 74-year-old spent Christmas poring over recent Ireland matches, he knows what to expect from Heimir Hallgrímsson’s team: “They play simple and straightforward football, and they are very aggressive and intense.”
Last week Koubek took his coaches on a tour of three Czech clubs’ training camps in Spain as 11 players from Viktoria Plzen, Slavia Prague and Sparta Prague made up the most recent squad.
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He would have been on familiar terrain with one group, having guided Plzen to a league title in 2015 before returning for a third stint at the club in 2023, when he took them to the Uefa Conference League quarter-finals in 2024 and Europa League knockout stages last season.
Czech football has been mired in crisis since fraud and embezzlement scandals erupted in 2017. But it was a 2-1 loss to the Faroe Islands last October, followed by a public conflict between fans and players, that proved the tipping point.
It means that Koubek has inherited a fine mess with only three months to reverse the national side’s downward spiral.
Their flight to leave the Faroe Islands after that 2-1 defeat was grounded for two days due to adverse weather.
On return to Prague, Ivan Hasek was sacked as manager, with the federation’s sporting director Pavel Nedved tasked with attracting a foreign coach to get the World Cup campaign back on track.
Jürgen Klinsmann was the early front-runner, in the media at least, but it turned out that the Czech FA could not afford an international name of the German’s calibre.
“Police investigations and legal disputes with former chairman Miroslav Pelta and vice-chairman Roman Berbr means there is no interest in sponsoring football,” explained Vit Chalupa, a Czech sports writer.
“Czechia has not played in the World Cup for 20 years, although it has played in every European Championship, so the national team has not earned much money.”
Following a long-running investigation and trial, Pelta was found guilty of fraud, sentenced to 5½ years in prison and fined five million Czech koruna (€206,000) in March 2024. The sentence was upheld on appeal last year.
In a separate case, Berbr was convicted of embezzlement and received a three-year suspended sentence and an €82,000 fine.
Nedved’s grand designs were softened by the ensuing financial reality. The Czech FA could not even afford a Hallgrímsson-type coach from abroad as their previous two national managers, Hasek and Jaroslav Silhavy, were only able to command salaries of around €250,000.
Hallgrímsson is currently negotiating a contract extension to coach Ireland at Euro 2028, with an improvement on his current €650,000 deal expected to be agreed, possibly before the World Cup play-offs.
After the Klinsmann dream ran aground and Slavia coach Jindrich Trpisovsky ruled himself out of contention, Koubek was framed as first choice all along.
“We had many other options, but the first one for me was hiring Miroslav Koubek,” said Nedved. “The process of choosing a national team coach is a complicated process, but I have to say that Mr Koubek was truly my first choice. I am glad that others supported it.”
Koubek appears as a hybrid version of Brian Kerr and Stephen Kenny: a respected coach over four decades on the domestic and underage international scenes, but largely unknown outside the country.
He was assistant coach to Karel Jarolím when the Czechs finished third in qualifying for the 2018 World Cup behind Germany and Northern Ireland.
“I believe that Mr Koubek is the right person to unite our entire football family,” said Czech FA president David Trunda. If that were true, why wait until he was the oldest man to ever coach the national side?
The only demand Koubek made was to appoint Jan Suchopárek, the classy sweeper from the side that lost the Euro ’96 final to Germany at Wembley, and the recent under-21 international manager, while keeping Jaroslav Plasil and Jan Rezek on the coaching ticket.
There is one more problem lingering from qualification, and it is not the Faroe Islands defeat but the 6-0 thrashing of Gibraltar in November when the players were accused of disrespecting their own supporters.
The ultra-fan base Fanatismus Cesko took particular issue with Tomás Soucek after the players refused to approach and applaud the crowd at full-time. As a result, the Czech FA refused to pay a qualifier bonus of €2,000 before stripping the West Ham United midfielder of the captaincy.
“I don’t know why they blamed everything on Tomás Soucek and took away his captaincy,” said Chalupa. “Perhaps as a scapegoat, because at that time the public was already seeing that Soucek was not performing well and therefore should not be captain.”
All the right noises have been made since Koubek’s appointment and Soucek is expected to be retained in the squad when a new captain is named.
The Czechs remain capable of pulling off a performance on March 26th. They have quality individuals such as Bayer Leverkusen striker Patrik Schick, who scores a goal every other game for both club and country, while midfielder Pavel Sulc is spearheading Lyon’s drive towards the Champions League with 12 goals and eight assists this season.
“The team is not in disarray, there is no fundamental problem among the players,” said Koubek. “We need to light a fire.”
