Re: Michael Nees’ recruitment as the Warriors coach MICHAEL Nees was fired from his job as Warriors coach on Wednesday – exactly 16 months after your ZIFA leadership settled on him as the best candidate for the post. The 58-year-old German coach won just TWO of the 14 competitive games which the Warriors played under his guidance, drew seven and lost the other five. His only victories came against the same opponents as the Warriors beat Namibia twice in the 2025 AFCON qualifiers.
His other victories came before his arrival in Zimbabwe – a 4-0 win in an AFCON/World Cup qualifier came against Liberia (4-0) and a 2-0 win over Equatorial Guinea, when he was in charge of Rwanda. Nees’ other win was a 2-1 victory over Zimbabwe when he was in charge of Seychelles. Nees’ shortcomings were crudely exposed in the 2026 World Cup qualifiers, where the Warriors ended their campaign bottom of the table, without any win to their credit.
A humiliating 0-1 loss at the hands of Lesotho, in the Warriors’ final World Cup qualifier, sealed Nees’ fate and he will not be part of the team at the 2025 AFCON finals in Morocco. Inevitably, questions should be asked as to why Nees was chosen, ahead of other coaches, as the man who had the best credentials to take charge of the Warriors? Why did your ZIFA leadership believe that a coach whose record showed that he had only won TWO matches, in AFCON or World Cup qualifiers, since his arrival in Africa, was the best candidate to guide the Warriors?
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Those two wins came against Equatorial Guinea (2-0, when he was in charge of Rwanda) and against Zimbabwe (2-1, when he was in charge of Seychelles) and did such a miserable record inspire any hope that this man was going to add value to the Warriors? Did your ZIFA leadership believe that one of the few coaches to ever lose a game against Eritrea, a nation which is not even ranked on the FIFA rankings because it has not played enough games to warrant such a ranking, was the right man to add value to the Warriors? Did your ZIFA leadership believe that a coach, who has never been to the AFCON finals, despite having been working in Africa for about two decades, was the best candidate who could help the Warriors finally make it out of the group stages for the first time? Nees lost his first game in his African adventure when Seychelles went down 1-3 to the Warriors at the National Sports Stadium on March 30, 2003.
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