Indian-origin manager sacked by Bundesliga club

Berlin: Robin Dutt, Indian-origin manager of the German football Bundesliga first division club VfB Stuttgart, has been sacked following the team's relegation from the bundesliga for the first time in over 40 years.

The 51-year-old Dutt is the third top official of VfB Stuttgart to lose their job after the club's demotion to the second division was sealed with a 1-3 defeat by VfL Wolfsburg last Saturday.

The club's chief coach Juergen Kramny was removed from his post with immediate effect on Sunday and its president Bernd Wahler laid down his office on the same day.

Dutt and the supervisory board of VfB Stuttgart have agreed after intensive discussions that that he will "leave the club to enable it a new beginning", supervisory board chairman Martin Schaefer said in a statement yesterday.

Dutt took over his responsibilities at a very difficult time and he worked with great passion for the club.

"It will be certainly wrong to put the blame entirely on him for the negative developments," the statement said.

The supervisory board also announced the appointment of Bundesliga second division coach Jos Luhukay as the new chief coach of the club. Luhukay is credited with taking several second division clubs to the top flight of German football.

His experience in this area was a main consideration for his appointment, VfB officials said.

Luhukay's immediate task is to train the VfB team for its first Bundesliga second division campaign since 1975, which begins within four weeks.

Dutt joined VfB Stuttgart in January last year as a management board member responsible for recruiting young football talents and for fostering their training and training of coaches. Three months earlier, he was sacked as the chief coach of the Bundesliga first division club SV Werder Bremen.

The northern German club's leadership blamed him for its poor start in a new national championship season and for its plunge to the bottom of the Bundesliga table by losing all nine matches played.

Before joining Werder Bremen, Dutt had served as the sporting director of the German Football Federation (DFB) and he was in charge of developing young talents and promoting the training of coaches.

Born on January 25, 1965 in Cologne as the son of an Indian migrant and a German mother, Dutt developed a passion for football at a very young age and after playing in the junior teams of some football clubs near Stuttgart, where he grew up, he worked his way up to the top levels of the national league.

His career as a football coach began in 1995 with a regional team and since then he had coached the second division team Stutgarter Kickers as well as the first division clubs SC Freiburg and Bayer Leverkusen.