Strategy for Success

DW-WORLD.DE: Having spent 11 seasons in the Bundesliga's first division since 1991, Rostock have been the most successful club from the former East Germany in reunified Germany. What's your secret?

Dirk Grabow: It would probably be better to let others answer that question since it might sound self-aggrandizing, if I do. But I think our success is down to the people involved with the club around the time of reunification. The team could have fallen apart around 1990. Instead, we won the double in 1990-91 and qualified for the first division of the unified Bundesliga. That was hugely important. We didn't disappear into a sinkhole. Instead we laid the foundations for 16 years of successful soccer.

Last year in the second division, it took until the final day of play for you to secure promotion. What put you over the top?

I think our big plus was our togetherness as a team, and by that I don't just mean the starting eleven, but the entire roster. It was our great strength.

Promotion has advantages and disadvantages. Two members of last season's starting eleven, goalkeeper Matthias Schober and defender Geldson, have gone elsewhere. But you also have money to invest. What's your strategy?

First of all it's completely normal that bigger clubs get interested in players who perform well at smaller ones. That happens not just to us, but to other established clubs. There can always be a bigger club looking to lure your players away. Our task now is to find replacement players who can not only maintain but improve our level of play. We have to build a squad for the coming season that will be capable of staying up. That's our main priority at the moment.

Are you looking to acquire new players across the board or just at specific positions?

We have to focus on the positions where players have left. That would first be in goal, and there we've signed Stefan Wächter (former Hamburg keeper). We also need reinforcements in our interior defense, and we already have one insofar as we exercised our purchase option on Diego Morais (who was previously on loan). He'll be with us for the coming season, but there will surely be a couple of new players as well. Those are the main areas we're working on.

In 2004-05 Rostock went down. What have you learned from that season that could help you avoid relegation in the coming one?

The main thing is to have a squad like the one we had last season that sticks together as a team. Soccer is a team sport. In the end, it's the team -- and not the sum of the best individual players -- that decides whether you have success or not. You can't necessarily plan success. What you can plan is general performance. You can develop performance, and we'll be working every day to raise the level at which the team performs. If we do that, success will follow.

How important will players from Rostock's own amateur ranks be?

A number of years ago, we built a new youth training facility and a dormitory for our soccer academy. We're always trying to develop young players and integrate them into our professional team. That's the main task of our youth work, and it's worked impressively in the past two seasons. Several players have made their way up and established themselves as regular members of the professional team. And that's a strategy we'll continue to focus on in the future.

And will Rostock stay up? Do you dream of emulating Nuremberg's surprise success last season and earning a spot in Europe?

No (laughs). Our primary goal has to be staying in the first division. But I'm convinced we'll achieve it.