Former Bayern Munich and Manchester United midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger has admitted that he misses the thrill of professional football and has not ruled out making a comeback as a manager.
A former Germany international, the 35-year-old hung up his boots last year after a three-season spell with the Chicago Fire in MLS.
However, he is now considering a return to the game.
“If something interesting was to come up at some point that I would enjoy, I’d think about it,” he admitted to Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. “But whenever I do something, I want to win and achieve something.”
Wife Ana Ivanovic, who he married in 2016 and has two sons with, believes that her husband would be highly successful in the dugout.
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“I’m convinced that Basti can become a great coach one day,” the former tennis player, who won Roland Garros in 2008, explained. “He has a passion for it, is good with people and knows a lot about football.”
Currently, Schweinsteiger is employed as an analyst with ARD and he says it is a role that he is enjoying.
“It suits me down to the ground to analyse games, especially after a long career in which I was constantly asking to have more time for my family,” he said.
Although he is pleased that German football has been able to return after a two-month break due to the coronavirus crisis, he admits that watching the game without full stadiums is not as fulfilling as an experience as it normally is.
“You’re used to watching the games played out in front of 50,000 fans, but after this long break, I’m also happy to be able to finally watch football again,” he said before going on to explain why teams seem to have had more difficulty winning at home in the three-and-a-half rounds since the resumption.
“If a stadium is full, like in Dortmund, for example, the fans exert a tremendous pressure and that’s missing now.”
During his playing career, Schweinsteiger played 13 years for Bayern Munich, winning eight Bundesliga titles and the 2013 Champions League, while he also featured 121 times for Germany, winning the World Cup with the national side in 2014.