Thomas Reis and Trabzonspor's Backroom Rebuild: When a New Coach Starts From the Seat Beside Him

A morning at the training ground, and three names on a sheet of paper

In football, a new coach's first signing is almost never a player. It is usually a name nobody searches for on a transfer site: an assistant, a fitness specialist, the man who stands behind the goal during finishing drills. Those names appear in a short announcement, then vanish from public memory within ten minutes.

I learned this late. In 2026, when I signed a book-writing contract alongside Long An at the age of 46, I sat through nine home matches and recorded three goals conceded in the final ten minutes. Nobody noticed the detail. Only when the club was eliminated from the AFC Cup did I understand that what decides results is not the final action, but how people prepared for it — in the dressing room, on the training pitch, and on the staff list.

At Trabzonspor, that list has just changed.

According to Sabah, Thomas Reis has officially begun his era at the Black Sea club. He has started building his own staff. Assistants Lochoff and Zenkovic have begun their duties. Fatih Yıldız is joining for athletic performance. A new foreign goalkeeper coach and new assistant coaches are also arriving. In the other direction, Hüseyin Çimşir and Metin Aktaş will not be part of the staff.

Six pieces of information. Not a single passage of play.

That is precisely why I am writing about this item. News of this kind gets skimmed, dismissed as administrative, filed under "procedures". But for someone who has spent most of his career sitting where there are no cameras, a staff list is a season's first blueprint. It tells you what methods the head coach believes in, whom he trusts, and whom he will argue with in November.

Between the two whistles there is a world the scoreboard cannot measure. And that world begins with a personnel list, not a tactical diagram.

Trabzonspor, and the burden of being a giant

To understand why replacing assistants at Trabzonspor matters more than a similar item elsewhere, the club has to be placed correctly on the map of Turkish football.

Trabzonspor was founded in 2026, in the city of Trabzon on the Black Sea coast. That city lies nearly a thousand kilometres east of Istanbul, and that geographical distance has shaped the club's identity. For decades, Trabzonspor were the only club to break the dominance of the Istanbul trio — Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe, Beşiktaş — in the national title race. Their nickname is "Fırtına", the storm.

In the 2026-2026 season, Trabzonspor won the Süper Lig. It was their first league title in nearly four decades, since 2026-2026. That milestone permanently changed expectations in this city.

This is the key point. In many places, a league title buys comfort. At Trabzonspor, it bought pressure. Having proved that Istanbul's dominance could be broken, the supporters no longer accept a place in the European qualifying pack. They want more, and they want it now.

Their stadium holds around forty thousand. I have sat in many stands, and I can say this without hesitation: sound in places like Trabzon is different. It is denser, closer, and it grants nobody the right to rest.

In such an environment, the coaching staff is not an internal matter. It is a public one. Every appointment is weighed. Every departure is read as a signal — of conflict, of failure, of a purge, or simply of a new philosophy.

That is why I want to read those six lines of news very slowly.

Thomas Reis: a man who builds from the foundations

Thomas Reis arrives at Trabzonspor with a coaching profile rooted in German football and in clubs that had to fight in uncomfortable conditions. His record suggests a coach of structure, who cares about shape when the ball is lost.

Here I want to pause, because this is where football writers most easily deceive themselves. When a new coach arrives, we tend to assign him a complete philosophy from day one: high pressing, possession, quick transitions, whatever label is fashionable. We do so because it gives us a sense of understanding.

But a coach who has not yet taken charge of a match at a new club does not yet have a philosophy there. He has intentions. And intentions, until they meet a real fixture list, a real injury, a real referee, remain intentions.

What we know for certain about Reis at Trabzonspor, at this point, comes down to one action: he is building his own staff.

This is instinctive for any new coach at a big club, but it is not trivial in its consequences. A head coach can talk tactics for hours in a press room. What actually changes players are the people standing beside him on the pitch every day: the man with the whistle who sets up drills, the man with the stopwatch, the man whispering into a substitute's ear in the seventieth minute.

A head coach sees the whole picture. An assistant sees the detail. And in modern football, detail decides.

Two departures: Hüseyin Çimşir and Metin Aktaş

According to Sabah, Hüseyin Çimşir and Metin Aktaş will not be part of the Trabzonspor staff.

As pure information, that is one short sentence. In human terms, it is two careers pivoting.

What matters for this analysis is not whether they were good or bad, but what they represented inside the old structure.

A coaching staff is not just a collection of expertise. It is a system of relationships. Domestic assistants do three jobs nobody writes into the job description: they know which player has a family problem; they know which midfielder has just been quietly reminded about his contract; they know which city's press room will be the most unpleasant in February.

That kind of knowledge is in no coaching manual. It accumulates. It is not taught.

When a new coach replaces these people with his own associates, the club trades one thing for another. It trades local knowledge for methodological alignment. It trades old relationships for new loyalty.

No trade is free.

And this is where I want to be blunt: a head coach choosing his own assistants is his right, and it is the condition on which he accepts responsibility for results. Nobody can demand that a new coach work with his predecessor's staff and still answer for failure.

What is worth debating is not that two assistants left. What is worth debating is the speed, and what came in to replace them.

Two arrivals: Lochoff and Zenkovic

According to the report, assistants Lochoff and Zenkovic have begun their duties at Trabzonspor.

I will be honest: writing these names requires the rule I set for myself after the 2026 World Cup. Correcting a wrong name takes 47 days; keeping a person's trust takes forever. The spelling of names, especially names transliterated from one language into Turkish and then into Vietnamese, is where journalism errs most and apologises least.

So what I can responsibly say about Lochoff and Zenkovic is this: they are assistants brought in by Thomas Reis, and the fact that they started early in the tenure carries its own meaning.

In football organisation there is a large difference between two groups of assistants. The first group starts with the head coach, meaning they help design the foundational drills, build a shared language with players, and shape the fitness programme for the entire preparation phase. The second group arrives later, once the programme is set, and their work is largely patching.

Lochoff and Zenkovic belong to the first group. In consequence, they will be the people chiefly responsible for turning Reis's intentions into players' daily habits.

This is work without glory. Nobody claps when a transition drill is executed correctly. Nobody writes a piece when a recovery session is well designed. But in December, when the calendar is dense and the team must play three matches in seven days, the difference between a well-prepared side and an unprepared one shows up in the eightieth minute.

In the eightieth minute, nobody remembers an assistant's name. But the assistant is the one who prepared that minute for four months.

Fatih Yıldız, and the fitness question

According to Sabah, Fatih Yıldız joins the Trabzonspor staff to take charge of athletic performance.

This is the item I rate highest in the whole report, because it points to a clearer direction than any tactical statement.

Let us take the role seriously. A fitness coach, or performance specialist in contemporary language, is responsible for three areas supporters rarely separate: base conditioning, injury prevention, and the team's capacity to endure the brutal stretches of a season.

Those three areas interlock in a way few notice. A better-conditioned player makes fewer mistakes in the eighty-fifth minute. A player making fewer mistakes commits fewer desperate tackles. Fewer desperate tackles mean fewer suspensions and injuries. And a squad with fewer injuries keeps the selection stability every head coach craves.

There is a data point I always remember here. Across nine Long An home matches in 2026, three goals were conceded in the closing ten minutes. Three. Nobody at the club called it a tactical problem. But lay those three goals side by side and read them together, and a pattern appears: the team lost its structure as its legs went.

The problem at Long An that year was not the shape. It was the players' legs in the eightieth minute.

Reis bringing in a performance specialist immediately suggests he understands this. He is preparing for a long season, not a pretty match.

Trabzonspor play in the Süper Lig, where the schedule is unforgiving, and in some seasons in European competition too. For a club expected to challenge for the title, the December-to-March window is decisive — and it is also when Turkish sides most often collapse under injuries.

If Fatih Yıldız does his job well, none of the forty thousand in Trabzon will know his name.

The foreign goalkeeper coach: an overlooked detail

One detail in the reported list deserves separate reading: the club is adding a foreign goalkeeper coach, along with new assistant coaches.

The wording carries a degree of ambiguity. The original phrase can be read two ways: that the goalkeeper coach is foreign, or that a foreign goalkeeper and new assistant coaches are arriving. These readings produce entirely different stories, and readers should know the source has not clarified the point.

If it is a foreign goalkeeper coach, this is a notable professional signal. Goalkeeping is the position modernised most slowly, and the one where differences between coaching schools are sharpest. A goalkeeper coach from another football culture brings different ideas about how a keeper participates in build-up, where he stands when the team pushes up, and how many fractions of a second he has to decide.

In modern football, the goalkeeper is the first player in build-up and the last in defending. A keeper uncomfortable with the ball at his feet can destroy a head coach's entire build-from-the-back idea.

If it is a foreign goalkeeper player, the story moves into squad personnel, and we would then need contract, salary and depth-chart information about the existing keepers.

I raise the ambiguity not to nitpick the source, but because it reflects the discipline I have forced on myself: when a sentence can be read two ways, the writer has an obligation to tell the reader there are two readings.

Ninety minutes nobody films

Most of a coaching staff's work happens where there is no audience.

A season at a leading club lasts about ten months. In that time the team plays roughly fifty matches, ninety minutes each plus stoppage time — about eighty hours of football with crowds and cameras.

In the same ten months the team trains nearly two hundred sessions, each between ninety minutes and two hours. That is three hundred to four hundred hours on the training pitch.

Consider the ratio. Four hundred hours nobody sees, against eighty hours everyone sees.

The staff is the main labour force in those four hundred hours. The head coach designs the programme; assistants execute it daily. An assistant notices that a player is running half a second slower than last week. An assistant spots a full-back hesitating in one-on-one defending drills. An assistant tells the head coach not to load a particular player today.

These decisions never appear on a scoreboard and never enter a statistics sheet. But they accumulate into results.

I once sat in an empty stand in Da Nang in 2026, when every stadium was closed. I recorded the wind, the closing of a dressing-room door, the footsteps of a groundsman. Those sounds taught me more about football than some matches I have watched.

Football is largely preparation, and preparation is silent.

What the data cannot yet say

Here I must limit myself, because readers are used to receiving numbers.

In the available information there is no tactical data on Trabzonspor under Thomas Reis. No expected goals, no passes allowed per defensive action, no possession figures, no formation used, and no matches managed to reference.

I say this plainly because the professional temptation to fill the gap with speculation is enormous. A writer could claim: "Under Thomas Reis, Trabzonspor will press high." It sounds expert. It has no evidential basis in the current source.

What I can honestly say is this: backroom personnel changes tell us nothing about tactical quality. They tell us about organisational direction.

A coach bringing two assistants, a performance specialist and a goalkeeper coach can produce many outcomes depending on the specific people. Some new staffs succeed spectacularly within three months. Some need half a season to find a common voice. And some never do, even when every individual is excellent.

In football, the quality of a coaching staff is not measured by the CVs of its members. It is measured by how well they understand each other after a defeat.

Forty-seven days and one name

There is a professional rule I must restate here, even at the risk of seeming overly cautious.

In 2026, at a World Cup match, I called a Russian international by the wrong name three times. Three times. I became a joke on social media in Vietnam and elsewhere.

How I handled that shaped how I work ever since. I spent forty-seven days reviewing the full footage of Russia's qualifying campaign, wrote a series on the lives of eleven substitutes, and in the process discovered a detail no outlet had mentioned: the father of the player whose name I had botched once played for Real Madrid.

That detail did not come from cleverness. It came from forty-seven days.

So what I say about Trabzonspor is what I am prepared to stand behind. Reis has begun. Two assistants have started. A performance specialist is arriving. Two assistants are leaving. The rest needs time.

Trabzonspor supporters deserve more than that. I have no right to invent more than that.

The counter-intuitive angle: modernisation, or just change?

When a big club changes coach and staff, the language of media is almost automatically the language of renewal. "A breath of fresh air", "a revolution on the bench", "a modernisation process". Foreign assistants get read as symbols of advanced methods. The departure of local assistants gets read as a club shedding the old.

I want to place a polite question mark over that whole reading.

Hiring foreign staff does not automatically mean improving technical quality. In many cases it simply means changing the source of personnel. A foreign assistant is not guaranteed to be better than a local one. He is only trained in a different system, with a different language, and under different market rules.

Conversely, retaining domestic staff does not mean stagnation. In many cases it is the only way to preserve practical knowledge of the league.

At Trabzonspor, letting Çimşir and Aktaş go may be the right call. I lack the information to conclude otherwise. But readers should recognise that the decision carries a hidden cost: the cost of losing people who know the club's internal culture.

That cost does not appear on a balance sheet. It appears in November, when a team loses twice in a row and someone in the dressing room needs to say one sentence in the local language to a player who has lost his confidence.

At a club with forty thousand in the stands and a recent title in memory, such moments can decide a tenure.

Work permits, licences, and what never makes the news

One aspect of the Trabzonspor changes will likely be ignored by most commentary: administration.

Football is a highly international labour market, and every country regulates how foreigners may work. In Turkey, foreign staff members typically need work permits, subject to conditions set by labour authorities and the national federation.

Then there is licensing. Across European football, to sit on a bench in professional competitions, staff usually must hold coaching qualifications at a certain level, recognised by the national federation and, where continental competitions are involved, by the continental governing body.

These rules sound dry, but they have practical consequences. An assistant without a valid work permit may not be allowed on the bench for official matches. A goalkeeper coach whose paperwork is unfinished may face restrictions in the technical area.

For a club preparing for a new season, such administrative hurdles can consume weeks that matter — and weeks in pre-season are worth more than weeks mid-season.

I have no information that Trabzonspor face such problems. I raise the issue because it is a real variable, and it usually becomes news only when it is too late.

Where the money sits in a staff story

The current report provides no financial figures. No transfer fee, because this is not a player transfer. No salary information for outgoing or incoming assistants. No severance figures. No relocation or settling-in costs.

What I can reasonably say is this: staff costs are usually far smaller than player wage bills at a big club. Even accounting for severance for two departing assistants and recruitment costs for four or five newcomers, the total is rarely comparable to the wages of a handful of first-team players.

This is not a financial issue. It is a professional and organisational one.

But one financial point matters for the near future. A new coach rarely changes only his staff. He then requests players. That is where real money is spent, and that is when board support gets tested.

Thomas Reis's freedom to build his staff signals that the board backs him. The next question is how long that backing lasts.

The dressing room: what is lost when an assistant goes

When two assistants leave, players do not read a press release. They experience the change through tiny details. The man who sets up the two-v-one drill changes. The familiar voice in the video session changes. The man who joked with them at lunch is gone.

Those shifts may not affect a firmly established starter. They matter enormously to a young player trying to establish himself, or an injured player spending most of his days with medical and fitness staff.

A lesson I carry from Long An: players do not evaluate a staff by expertise. They evaluate by presence. An assistant who remembers a player's child's name is worth more than a more qualified assistant who appears only in tactical meetings.

With a heavily foreign staff, the problem compounds. Language barriers in a dressing room cannot be solved by interpreters, because most football communication happens in very short, very fast, very emotional sentences.

A fitness coach can say "faster" in English. But for a player to feel seen, someone needs to say the right thing in his mother tongue.

That is why staffs with more local assistants tend to adapt faster in the first three months. And why staffs with more foreign assistants can overtake them after a year, once the methods have soaked in.

A mirror from the V.League

Vietnamese clubs have been through similar backroom overhauls for years, and those experiences offer useful observations.

The first concerns language. Staffs with several foreign members in Vietnam typically take three to six months to find a working rhythm with Vietnamese assistants. That period is not wasted, but it is real, and it is rarely built into season plans.

The second concerns division of labour. Where job titles are not sharply professionalised, hiring a fitness specialist often drags in ambiguity about authority. Who decides training load? Who has the right to rest a player? These conflicts rarely make the news, but they can paralyse a staff.

The third concerns patience. Vietnamese football changes coaches faster than a fitness programme needs to prove itself. A conditioning programme needs at least two preparation cycles to demonstrate value. If a coach is replaced after six months, the programme never had a chance to prove anything.

I raise these not to rank the two football cultures. The same organisational problems appear everywhere, only at different scales.

Sabah, one source, and expectations

On sourcing, one thing should be clear. The original report comes from Sabah, a mainstream Turkish daily of medium reliability. It is a single source, and staffing stories always need cross-checking against official club announcements and federation registration data.

There is another possibility I offer as a hypothesis, not a claim. In football, staff stories are sometimes deliberately briefed by clubs to prepare supporters for contentious changes. Emphasising the foreign and performance elements can serve as a message of professionalisation.

I have no proof of this in Trabzonspor's specific case. But readers should know the mechanism exists.

As for the attention cycle, this is short-lived news. It will be read heavily for twenty-four hours, then sink, and resurface only when the first match comes or another appointment lands. It matters to Trabzonspor supporters tracking the new era, and little to the rest of European football.

That does not make it meaningless. It only defines its actual weight.

Six signals to watch

Given what exists, I suggest six specific signals in the coming weeks.

First, official club confirmation. Appointments being verified on Trabzonspor's channels or in the Turkish federation's registration system will reduce the current ambiguity.

Second, work-permit status for foreign members. If they appear on the bench in friendlies or the first competitive match, paperwork is done. If not, it is a live issue.

Third, the lineup in the first competitive match under Reis. That will be the first real tactical data we get.

Fourth, player reaction. Comments on new training methods, however brief, usually indicate whether a new staff is being accepted.

Fifth, transfer activity. If Reis is backed in key positions, it confirms board support for his project.

Sixth, results in the first four or five matches. This is the most important signal and the least technical, because early results determine how everything else is read.

I do not keep the rhythm for the club; I keep the rhythm for the people who keep the rhythm for the club. Right now, in Trabzon, four or five people are starting a job nobody will remember them for if they succeed.

An open thought

The Thomas Reis era at Trabzonspor has begun, and it began the way most coaching eras begin: with changes in people, not in playing style.

Two assistants out. Two assistants in. A performance specialist joining. A foreign goalkeeper coach on the way. That is the sum of what we know for sure.

Everything else — whether Trabzonspor press high or sit deep, whether the defensive line steps up or holds, whether the squad has the legs to race into May — has no answer yet. Admitting that matters more than pretending we already know.

Football never owes us a result; it only owes us a story. Trabzonspor's story is on chapter one, page one, and that page contains only a staff list.

What I will watch is not whether Thomas Reis succeeds. What I will watch is whether the Trabzonspor board gives him enough time for that story to reach its final page.

Because in football, everyone wants an ending. Very few are willing to read the middle.