by “I thought I wouldn’t be able to get out of it” – Steffi Jones talks about high debt
Former national team coach Steffi Jones was half a million euros in debt
Source: Picture Alliance/SvenSimon/Anke Waelischmiller/SVEN SIMON
Steffi Jones was a national team soccer player. However, the Frankfurt native encountered major financial problems. In an interview she now talks about the dark hours. And she explains how she overcame the financial crisis.
DFormer national football team coach Steffi Jones almost collapsed due to a debt problem. In an interview with Spiegel, the 50-year-old speaks openly about the great economic worries of his past and how football saved her.
The former national team player (111 international matches) was responsible for the selection of the German Football Association (DFB) from 2016 to 2018. And he had a difficult childhood and youth in Frankfurt am Main. “My mother worked day and night, she had three jobs: she worked in the bank, waited tables and cleaned. “Still, we couldn’t afford a lot of things,” Jones said in the interview. “I started delivering newspapers at 13, and at 16 I also went to clean my stepfather’s restaurant.”
“I thought about hitting the wall”
Especially tragic: His brother used much of the money he earned to finance his drug addiction. When she was 19, Jones said, she considered giving up: “I was so devastated that I sat in the car and thought about whether I should hit the wall.”
Furthermore, a construction project subsequently caused her enormous difficulties. “We had planned to make a dream come true: my mother, her partner and I wanted to build a house, so we asked for a mortgage. Then the builder of the cellar went bankrupt, we had a big legal dispute with the neighbors and things went completely wrong. In the end we had 500,000 euros of debt.” She was completely desperate at the time, Jones says. “I thought I would never get out of there.”
Jones played as a footballer in 1. FFC Frankfurt, among others, and ended his career in 2007. “I didn’t mind earning money with other jobs. I sat at the checkout at Lidl, I was a shop manager at the age of 21” , I’ve already played in the Bundesliga” , he said.
“Football brought me up”
She only started earning well in 2008, when she became president of the organizing committee of the 2011 Women’s World Cup in Germany, and later director of the DFB. But she only managed to get out of debt in 2008, thanks to her wife Nicole.
He comes from banking and it helped her. «Funds, life insurance, Riester, you know them. “She understood what I would need next,” Jones says. “Today we have a large property and mom lives with us.” In general, she says about her life: “Football took me, it was my salvation.”
Steffi Jones was inducted into the German Football Hall of Fame in 2019 and received the trophy in Dortmund
Source: Picture Alliance/SvenSimon/Elmar Kremser/SVEN SIMON
In 2018, Jones was fired from the post of national team coach because the quarterfinal exit at the 2017 European Championships was too disappointing. Two years later, she took part in the RTL show “Let’s Dance”. Today he is CEO of his wife’s IT company, lectures and also trains managers.
“I’ll explain what it means to put together a team. And how to deal with defeat,” Jones said. “Brief analysis of the error, then we look ahead. Just don’t dwell on the negatives for too long.
