Hennes Weisweiler – The Don: It is no accident that Borussia’s current postal address is Hennes-Weisweiler-Allee 1. With him, the club rose from provincial outfit to internationally recognized force. To this day, no manager stayed longer. For eleven years the Cologne-born Weisweiler ran the show in Gladbach.\n\nHis attacking style made waves, and experts still speak with admiration about his counterattacking blueprint.
His 1959 manual Football: Tactics, Training, Team remains a standard work in coaching education. The offensive-minded coach played an enormous part in the popularity Borussia still enjoy.\n\nHis credo was simple: “The point of football is to score more goals than the opponent, not simply to concede fewer.” His players took him literally. On January 7, 1967, Borussia produced the first double-digit scoreline in Bundesliga history by crushing Schalke 11:0. Under Weisweiler, Gladbach won 169 of 340 matches and he never signed a formal contract there — a spoken word was enough.
When he broke that word in May 1975 by unexpectedly agreeing to join Barcelona, he left the Bökelberg on bad terms. The bitterness has long since passed; the club proved as much by dedicating a six-month museum exhibition to him in 2020.