Bo Henriksen is a wild man. With his long, raffish blond hair, he looks like he might have played some stages and smashed a few guitars.
The 49-year-old has been head coach at Bundesliga club Mainz for just over two months. A former centre-forward whose playing career wound through his native Denmark, Iceland and even Kidderminster Harriers and Bristol Rovers in England’s lower divisions, he is now leading a remarkable revival on the banks of the Rhine.
“We’re starting to get there,” Henriksen tells The Athletic. “We haven’t reached our goals. But we are getting better.”
A team who were lifeless for six months of the 2023-24 season are now playing with frenetic energy, resilience and craft. On Sunday, that continued. Mainz came from a goal down to take a valuable away point away against Freiburg. Now unbeaten in five, a team who won one of their first 21 league games are out of the relegation places for the first time since August.
When Henriksen was appointed, few believed Mainz could survive. The table did not lie; the team he inherited did not score enough goals and conceded far too many.
“I don’t believe in luck,” he says. “I believe in performance. For one game, maybe you can talk about luck, but if you’ve played 21 games and only won one, it’s not a coincidence.”
It had been a wearying campaign.
Bo Svensson, Mainz’s popular previous head coach and another Dane, who spent five years with the club as a player from 2009, departed by mutual consent in November. Svensson rescued the side from near-certain relegation three years ago after being appointed in the January, before leading them to successive top-half finishes. But with his job under threat and his team running on fumes, an exhausted Svensson announced he was leaving in a tearful video.
Henriksen has led Mainz to the brink of safety (Neil Baynes/Getty Images)
Jan Siewert, the former Huddersfield Town head coach, was given the opportunity to revive the side, but with little success. That led them three months later to Henriksen, whose coaching career had begun in the Danish second tier with Bronshoj, developed over six largely excellent years at Horsens, and peaked with a Danish Cup win with Midtjylland and nearly a Superliga title, too.
In October 2022, he was hired by FC Zurich. It was his first job outside Denmark and he was tasked with rebalancing a wilting side languishing at the foot of the Swiss Super League.
Zurich had been winless in 10 games when he came in but Henriksen turned them into a side who lost just six times over the next seven months. This season began brightly, too, but with his contract due to expire in the summer and the opportunity to coach in a competition of the Bundesliga’s greater standing, the decision to leave in February – and to join a team seemingly certain to be relegated – was easier than it looked.
“I thought it was a really good opportunity,” Henriksen says. “First of all, to survive in the Bundesliga, then to take the next step. In the short term, it was a test for me in a big environment. This is a club which has been successful for many, many years and also has a really good culture.”
Mainz are part of the origin stories of Jurgen Klopp (a player for them, then their manager from 2001-08) and Thomas Tuchel (2009-14), and the subsequent successes of those two have framed everyone to follow in their footsteps.
The Next Klopp. The Next Tuchel. Those comparisons are not helpful, but there are commonalities among those who have led Mainz beyond their means. A type of personality, perhaps: energetic, charismatic, capable of enrapturing players. That sort of stuff has worked there.
Klopp in charge of Mainz in 2005 (Stuart Franklin/Getty Images)
Mainz knew what they were looking for. When announcing Henriksen’s appointment, sporting director Christian Heidel described a “coach who is a very emotional, open and opinionated character who radiates an incredibly positive energy and very will fit well”.
You do not have to spend much time in Henriksen’s presence to see what Heidel saw and to know that he was right. Henriksen has an effervescence to him. On the touchline, in an interview, he radiates positivity and optimism, and it’s not hard to imagine how he might perk up previously jaded players.
“I believe in the people here,” he says. “And in what I see and feel at this club. I’m not afraid of anything other than not being brave enough to dare to win.”
Henriksen means it. He wants quicker, more purposeful football. He wants it infused with ideas, belief and a more holistic change: “I can’t rescue anybody. I can only create a culture in which we can rescue ourselves. Because they’ve tried everything. When I analysed the 21 games (played in the league this season before I arrived), I didn’t see players who weren’t doing their best.
“We have to unlock these players and give them the freedom to play and to make mistakes. I can’t teach them to play football in two days or five days or even five weeks. But hopefully, we can create a culture where we can do things together.
“That’s always the biggest part of every job I have. And it’s not just true in football. If people are not comfortable, if they’re not happy, and don’t feel like they can be open, then they won’t be the best version of themselves.”
Suddenly, players are transformed.
Jonathan Burkardt, a waspish forward, has recovered from a year out with a knee injury and is playing superbly. Playmaker Lee Jae-sung has emerged from a miserable slump. Brajan Gruda, perhaps the most talented young player at the club, is stirring in attack again. Anthony Caci at wing-back. Robin Zentner in goal. The improvements are too many to mention.
Players deadened by a long season of losing now have fire in their eyes again. The conservative, fearful football has gone, too, and Henriksen and his staff have managed to chase away the fear that stalked this team.
Henriksen has got Gruda back to his best (Neil Baynes/Getty Images)
“I don’t care about mistakes, I care if you don’t track back,” Henriksen says. “I care if you don’t put your team-mates above everyone else. That is the culture we are relying on now. I’m proud of the guys.”
Mainz looked such a hopeless case in February that, really, they needed empathy as much as anything else. Henriksen approached his new job with compassion, recognising that the players needed rehabilitating.
“I’ve been there as a player,” he says. “You want to do your best, but you can’t. It can be in an emotional way. It can be in a physical way. It can be because you don’t dare (express yourself). Or because you don’t trust your team-mates. It can be all sorts of things.”
He believes, too, that reversing bad form starts with arresting the doom cycle that traps an underperforming side:
“If everybody — journalists like you and everybody else — are talking badly about the players, and then they’re going home and getting a call from their parents asking why they’ve lost again, and then they read the papers the next day and everyone’s talking bad about them… it just goes on and on. In the end, they start believing that they’re bad.
“That’s difficult for players. Especially for young players. Some of ours are 19. Imagine that when you’re 19! Today, the players can’t go anywhere without social media. It is difficult. It’s hard to be a young person in this world.
“So, I’m their leader. I have to stand in front of this group and say, ‘We’ll win together, lose together and as long as you do your best, everything else is my fault’.”
Henriksen means that. When he arrived, there was a quick bounce. Mainz beat visitors Augsburg 1-0 in his first game, were narrowly beaten 2-1 away by title-bound Bayer Leverkusen in his second, despite being down to 10 men. In his third, his players battled to a creditable 1-1 draw at home against Borussia Monchengladbach.
In the second week of March, though, Mainz travelled to Munich for his fourth game, which is where that fragile progress was shattered. Behind only 2-1 late in the first half, they ended up losing 8-1 to champions Bayern; unsurprisingly, their heaviest defeat of the season. That was about him, Henriksen claims, a match he overthought.
“You can put in all the tactics you want,” Henriksen says. “We did that against Bayern. I was really, really clever — so clever — and we talked about tactics all week. We had planned down to the smallest detail for what each player had to do. I thought I could win that game on the tactics board, and every time I believe I can do that, I lose.”
The key, he says — the lesson he has learned the hard way — is that players feeling at ease with what they are asked to do matters more than anything. Particularly with Mainz in their current situation.
“I’ve played all systems as a coach,” he says, “and for me, it’s not about formations, but about what players are capable of doing. What do they feel secure in? What do they feel comfortable in?
“I don’t play the game, they do. So, I ask my players a lot: what do they trust in? What have they tried before? If I go into the dressing room and say, ‘We have to do this, this and this’ and the players are not comfortable, then I’m going to look stupid. Because we’d be doing it for my sake, so I can look good.
“I don’t have to look good. I don’t look good anyway. I haven’t looked good in 49 years, so why should I start now?!”
That defeat to Bayern now looks like the moment Mainz’s season changed. They are unbeaten in the five games since, winning three, scoring 11 goals and conceding two. The most recent point, from that come-from-behind draw in Freiburg on Sunday, saw them move out of their relegation spots.
“The day after the Munich game, we just said to the guys, ‘Right, we’re going back to your basics and what you’ve been known for, for a long time’. Because they’ve had really good coaching, especially under Bo Svensson, when they knew exactly what to do, tactically, to the point where it was in-built.
“Now it’s about fight, ability, whether we can trust each other. Every tackle. Every second ball. What is Mainz? They know exactly what to do. We just have to release that.”
On Sunday, Mainz host second-bottom Cologne. Victory will not guarantee safety but three points for Henriksen and his players will make them favourites to avoid the drop.
As recently as six weeks ago, that was unthinkable.
(Top photo: Alex Grimm/Getty Images)
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