Hertha Berlin is bringing Pal Dardai back for a third stint as coach after firing Sandro Schwarz in a bid to escape relegation.
The Bundesliga club said Sunday that the 47-year-old Dárdai will take over for the rest of the season.
He has six games to save Hertha from demotion.
Hertha has been flirting with relegation every season since investor Lars Windhorst first backed the club in 2019.
On Friday, however, the team dropped to last in the Bundesliga with a 5-2 loss at fellow struggler Schalke, which was previously bottom. It stretched Hertha’s run without a victory to six games.
The next six games – against Werder Bremen, Bayern Munich, Stuttgart, Cologne, Bochum and Wolfsburg – will need to be better if Hertha is to avoid another drop to the second division following its last demotion in 2012.
The club had maintained its faith in Schwarz as coach even as the team struggled to transfer reported good work in training to competitive games. Schwarz remained in charge when Hertha fired Fredi Bobic as head of sport in January.
It was Bobic who appointed Schwarz, the former Dynamo Moscow and Mainz coach, as Hertha’s coach last summer. Bobic also fired Dárdai in November 2021 when Hertha was 14th in the 18-team division.
Hertha also fired assistant coaches Volkan Bulut and Daniel Fischer on Sunday.
As a Hertha player, Dardai made a club-record 286 Bundesliga appearances.
In his first stint in charge from February 2015 through the 2018-19 season, Dardai mostly led Hertha to comfortable mid-table finishes.
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