Friday, March 5, 2021 at 3:19 PM• Mart Oude Nijeweeme • Last update: 15:20

Almere City has responded to the resignation of head coach Ole Tobiasen. The Danish coach was unexpectedly dismissed on Thursday at the Flevolanders, who lost four of the last five games under his leadership. According to the club management, the dismissal of Tobiasen is not due to the fact that Almere has dropped in the rankings. The club received signals that strongly indicated that there was no support for a longer cooperation.

Tobiasen seemed to compete with Almere for a long time for the top two places in the Kitchen Champion Division, which mean direct promotion to the Eredivisie at the end of the stage. In recent weeks, however, it went a lot less and the team dropped to fourth place. “It’s not about those four defeats in the past few weeks or that we are no longer in a PhD position,” says technical director Teun Jacobs. Football International. “It has to do with support. We noticed that this was decreasing. That has been going on for several weeks. The energy in the group was gone. ”

The dismissal is remarkable, as Tobiasen was recently close to a contract extension at Almere. “We had made him a contract proposal to extend, but we had already withdrawn that a few weeks ago,” Jacobs continues. “Because we received signals that we had to take seriously. Ultimately, this is the result of today’s decision. ” Tobiasen had been employed by Almere since 2018, where he started as an assistant trainer, later moved on as an interim trainer and since 2019 as head coach for the group.

“We think we had to make this decision right now. That is difficult, because Ole is a nice person, but also easy because you can see that what we were doing no longer went the way we thought it should go. You cannot influence results, but you can influence the process. Then you have to turn the knobs. A blanket hung over the team ”, Jacobs concluded. Assistant coach Jeroen Rijsdijk finishes the season as the person with ultimate responsibility at Almere, which will receive a visit from the also ailing Excelsior on Saturday afternoon.