Some Tottenham Hotspur fans have been calling for Jurgen Klinsmann to return to their club as their next manager but another Germany legend is not such a fan.
Spurs are yet to appoint their new manager, having relieved Jose Mourinho of his duties almost two months ago, back on April 19.
A new director of football figure is set to join the club this week in Fabio Paratici, having filled a similar role at Juventus for 11 years.
His first task will be to appoint a new head coach at the club and one man who has thrown his hat into the ring in recent weeks is Klinsmann.
The 56-year-old became a fans' favourite during two spell at the club as a player during the 1990s, the first time saw the World Cup winner lighting up the Premier League as one of the best strikers in Europe and the second time returning on loan to help Tottenham escape relegation.
Klinsmann had success as an international manager, taking Germany to the World Cup semi-finals in 2006 and the USA to the round of 16 at the 2014 World Cup.
However, his club management career has been a disaster. He lasted just over nine months in charge of Bayern Munich before being sacked with them third in the Bundesliga table.
It would be a decade before Klinsmann returned to club management again, but he lasted just ten weeks at Hertha Berlin in 2019 before stepping down.
Despite his struggles in club management, some Tottenham fans have called for his appointment and the German admitted his interest this week in one interview and that he spoke to the club's chairman after Mourinho's exit.
"Spurs let go Jose Mourinho and yeah I had a great phone call there with Daniel Levy and he said 'you know, let's see what all happens down the road'. He had to clarify things but since then I've had no more contact with Spurs," Klinsmann told ESPN when asked if he had spoken to Tottenham.
"Now would it be something that would be of interest to any type of manager. Yes absolutely. Tottenham is Tottenham and you would always listen to that situation. For me obviously Tottenham is a lot more."
However, one man who clearly was not a fan of Klinsmann as a club manager was Philipp Lahm, who won the World Cup as well as the Champions League and eight Bundesliga titles at Bayern Munich.
He wrote about his experiences of those nine months playing for Klinsmann at Bayern in his autobiography The Subtle Difference, published in 2011.
"We practically only practiced fitness under Klinsmann. Tactical things were neglected. There was very little technical instruction and the players had to get together independently before the game to discuss how we wanted to play," Lahm wrote.
"All the players knew after about eight weeks that it was not going to work out with Klinsmann. The remainder of that campaign was nothing but limiting the damage."
He added: "The Klinsmann experiment had failed."
Lahm also mentioned an anecdote from his Bayern team-mate Ze Roberto, who said that one half-time team talk by Klinsmann toward the end of his reign consisted of only: "You have to score a goal."
Klinsmann, having at the time of the book's publication only recently become the USA head coach, gave his response to reporters after it was serialised in German newspaper Bild.
"It's basically a player's perspective who never has the coaching perspective. He doesn't see the big picture, what actually the work of a coach means," he told them.
"As a player, there's no perfect coach to you, and as a coach, there's never a perfect, perfect player and it's just normal.
"I had wonderful coaches throughout my career, from an [Arsene] Wenger [at AS Monaco] to a [Cesar Luis] Menotti [at Sampdoria] to a [Franz] Beckenbauer [with West Germany's champs and at Bayern] to a [Berti] Vogts [with Germany's national team] to [Ossie] Ardilles [at Tottenham and Giovanni] Trapattoni [with Bayern].
"They've won everything. I am so thankful I had that opportunity. Was there a perfect, perfect one? For sure not, because when you work with each other, you [work through] ups and downs. It's just normal."
