Before the first Bundesliga game of TBV Lemgo on Thursday evening, the German club fired their coach Markus Baur and the sports director Daniel Stephan.

Late Wednesday evening the club published a very short press release on their website stating that the current assistant coach, Jürgen Franke, and the player Daniel Kubes take the responsibility for the team at the first league game against Magdeburg.

The news on Baur and Stephan, who have been in charge for two years playing for Lemgo a long time, was absolute surprise. The club didn’t give an official reason for the decision, but it’s obvious that missing the Champions League group phase played an important role.

Lemgo counted on the matches and the revenues from the CL, but they failed at the Wild Card qualification tournament in Leon after being defeated by Leon, Schaffhausen and Celje.

Rumours have it that Lemgo counted on about 300,000 Euro from the Champions League.

“We sat together with the club board and discussed the future. We decided to fire both of them,” club manager Volker Zerbe said in the press release.

Baur became coach in January 2008, after his first coaching experience in Winterthur (Switzerland). Stephan was sports director since 2007 after finishing his career (13 years for Lemgo).

Local media discuss who could succeed Baur. Names such as Volker Mudrow (former coach of Lemgo), Eric Veje Rasmussen (former coach of Flensburg) and Staffan Olsson (coach of Swedish national team and Hammarby) were mentioned. The club intend to decide very quickly about the new coach and sports director.