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Essential The Official Football (Soccer) Thread - Ralf Rangnick's Red Army - No Vibes, Just Tactics

Discussion in 'The Coliseum' started by Gilver, May 1, 2012.

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Raphael Honigstein on Rangnick(in case you don't have an Athletic sub)

This week wasn’t the first time Ralf Rangnick had been interviewed for a job at Manchester United.

Or that’s how it felt to him, at least.

In the autumn of 2019, United’s football director John Murtough travelled to Leipzig to study the Red Bull football group’s facilities and corporate strategy. A proud Rangnick, eager to show off a Champions League club he had essentially built himself, hosted Murtough for eight hours, at the end of which the German sensed that the real reason for the visit might have been him. His suspicion that he had been sounded out was strengthened when he got word that an unnamed club was conducting background research into his working methods, tapping into his mentor Helmut Gross, a trained structural engineer turned tactical maverick, and Lars Kornetka, a long-time Rangnick collaborator, for insight into his footballing beliefs and his character.

Both offered glowing reviews, painting Rangnick as a hyper-energetic football perfectionist obsessed by the smallest detail. In the end, though, the anticipated call from Old Trafford didn’t come. Rangnick never learned if United had commissioned the dossier.

This time, there was no doubt about United’s intentions. Rangnick is about to take over as interim manager following the departure of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. Cristiano Ronaldo and co are about to get some very hands-on coaching.

Rangnick found his calling early. Very early. “You’re kind of born to be a coach,” he told Red Bulletin in October. “Even at the age of six, playing with 10-year-olds, I wanted to pick the teams, organise the game and show others how they could improve.”

The ages of the players have since changed but Rangnick’s passion for helping others play football better has only burnt more brightly in the interim. “My job — the job — is to improve players,” he wrote in a piece for The Coaches’ Voice in 2018. “Players follow you if they feel that you make them better. That’s the greatest, most sincere motivation there is.” And it works both ways.

Unbeknown to him at the time, the 63-year-old started to learn the basics of modern coaching in his early twenties when he was playing football for Stuttgart’s second team and studying to be a teacher (in English and sports) at Stuttgart University. One of the courses was in the newly devised subject of sports science.

“We were a class of 20 boys and girls, everyone had a background in organised sports,” he said. “One of the girls played volleyball for the best women’s team and I was amazed to hear that they were training up to 10 hours a day, including two in the gym and two for tactical moves. Other sports were light years ahead of football. We were doing almost nothing in comparison, two hours of training, a bit of exercise.” Rangnick realised that with better preparation, especially in terms of athleticism and collective playing patterns, footballers could reach higher levels of performance.
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Nov 25, 2021

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After he was released by Ulm 1846 at the age of 25, Rangnick turned out for his hometown side Viktoria Backnang as player-manager. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he took over the running of the first team. “My father (a newspaper layout editor) and I published the stadium program. I put tape straps on players because I knew a bit about medicine from my studies. I once threw a crate of beer out of the dressing room to make a point, banned smoking within two hours of a game and introduced warm-downs.”

Rangnick later said that he was always determined to get the best man or woman possible for the increasing number of specialised roles in modern football’s. At provincial outfits like Backnang, he clearly was the best man of every job. Because there was no one else. But things became more complicated when he worked for blue-chip sides later in his career. The higher he went, the more people he found doing tasks simply because they had done them for a long time. There was no quality control, no sense of people striving to improve, no challenge to their tried and trusted ways.

Schalke’s patriarchal club boss Rudi Assauer — who was rarely caught without a big cigar in his mouth — mocked Rangnick for busying himself with every minutia of a team’s organisation, down to “telling the bus driver how to do his job”. Years later, Rangnick admitted he had a hard time delegating in those days but countered that Assauer’s bus driver example was not well chosen: “I only got involved because our bus driver once got lost on the short way from the Gelsenkirchen team hotel to the stadium! In the history of the Bundesliga, that was the only time a game had to be delayed because the home team had arrived late.”

A chance friendly against Valeriy Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv at Backnang’s winter training camp Sportschule Ruit in 1984 provided the next big lightbulb moment. The Ukrainians played a sophisticated zonal marking and pressing system, and defensive midfielder Rangnick was completely swamped by waves and waves of opponents bearing down on him. It felt as if they had “one or two men more” on the pitch to him.

The teacher went back to being a student. Rangnick turned up to see Kyiv train at Ruit every winter with a notepad, trying to figure out what they were doing and how. Meanwhile, the few tactics lessons he received during his Pro Licence coaching course in Germany were firmly stuck in the 1970s, espousing the benefits of a sweeper system and man-marking. That’s how things were done in Germany. Why change?

Rangnick and his mentor Gross, a trained structural engineer turned self-taught maverick coach who had introduced his version of “ballorientierte Raumdeckung”, a system that combines zonal marking and pressing to lower-league football in south-west Germany, began writing coaching guidelines for the regional federation. Gross was eventually made head of development of Stuttgart in 1989 and Rangnick won the German youth championship as coach of their under-21s two years later.

He had taken inspiration from Arrigo Sacchi’s AC Milan, watching videotapes sent over from Italy until the VCR broke down. Sacchi, a former shoe salesman, was also a personal role model. Bundesliga clubs were almost exclusively coached by former star players in those days but Sacchi had broken the mould, showing that know-how was more important than a trophy-laden playing career.

But big German clubs were reluctant to promote a virtual no-name to a first-team role. Rangnick resigned from his role as director of youth and amateur football when he was overlooked as the choice of assistance coach in 1994. A close shave with promotion at third-division Reutlingen won him an appointment by Ulm, with whom he managed to go up to Bundesliga 2 in 1997.

Suddenly people took notice: a team lacking in stars and big finances immediately started challenging for the top spots thanks to their novel back-four formation and concerted pressing. Rangnick was invited to ZDF Sportstudio, Germany’s Match of the Day equivalent, to explain this wondrous system to the masses. His appearance was a revelation, the first mainstream discussion of tactics on free-to-air television, but it also earned him many enemies. Prominent coaches were jealous of the bespectacled upstart’s limelight and irked by the implication that their methods were outdated. A tabloid backlash occurred. He was mockingly described as a “professor” and “a theorist”. In other words, a phoney.
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Rangnick was taken aback by the criticism. “What I said was pretty banal by international standards but others saw it as an attack.” For a long time, he regretted going on air but also said he couldn’t have turned down the opportunity. Ever the teacher, he wanted to explain the workings of his football to the maximum number of people. “Ralf is very generous when it comes to sharing knowledge, perhaps too generous at times,” a long-time confidant tells The Athletic.

Success with Ulm, who won promotion for a second year running and went up to the Bundesliga, delivered his first big job: head coach at Stuttgart in 1999. But he immediately came up against a problem that would follow him around at other top-level engagements. The same people who hired him to bring in change lost their nerve when those changes threatened the existing order. Rangnick’s reformist zeal lost traction amid the complex power structure of a club that’s never happy at the best of times. He didn’t enjoy Stuttgart’s full backing when he suspended Krasimir Balakov, an old-school playmaker who didn’t fancy all that running. A few months later, Rangnick got sacked.

“Working with him can be difficult because he expects things to happen immediately,” a Bundesliga official who knows him well tells The Athletic. “There’s no such thing as ‘tomorrow’ for him. He’ll call you late at night with an idea — he never stops thinking about football during his waking hours — and he expects you to have a good answer straight away. He’s very demanding. It can be overwhelming for those who don’t know him because he wants them to develop and innovate very quickly. But those who can handle those types of demands tend to grow a lot in their careers. He pushes you to get better along the way.”

Getting fired from Stuttgart was Rangnick’s first real setback. He went down a division to take over Hannover 96 but he was soon up again, guiding his new team to the top flight in 2002. A fall-out with the club’s hierarchy led to his dismissal in 2004 and that ill-fated intermezzo at Schalke, where he won over the crowd but not his superiors.

Another career reset further down the ladder proved to be a breakthrough. Billionaire Dietmar Hopp entrusted him with the most remarkable project in German football: leading a literal village club (population 3,260) from the third division to the Bundesliga. And Rangnick did exactly that, with his team playing a kind of game that had never been seen in the German top flight before. Hoffenheim, who were made up of local players that had been overlooked by other German sides and unknown foreigners such as Brazilians Carlos Eduardo and Luiz Gustavo, Nigeria striker Chinedu Obasi and Demba Ba of Senegal, overwhelmed opponents with their concerted pressing and thrilling, high-tempo, vertical football.

“It was perhaps the fastest Bundesliga match ever,” national team manager Joachim Low said after Hoffenheim’s match against Bayern Munich as surprise league leaders in December 2008. “Pure quality football, an advertisement for the league.” The Bavarians had edged the sensational match 2-1 but the visitors won all the plaudits. “Their system is the star,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote.

The “system” in question didn’t just refer to the tactical set-up. Rangnick hired people for jobs that hadn’t existed at football clubs before — a video analyst, a sports psychologist — and devised complex training sessions that put the players under maximum mental pressure to make the real game feel more comfortable by comparison. His game also required an integrated transfer strategy. “He only brought in players that were right for playing his way,” Gross said. “They were mostly young, under-23s, open-minded, physically strong and quick in a cognitive sense. Older players often want to play at a slower pace because their bodies and minds slow down.”
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In public, Rangnick sometimes came across as a little dour. But he was very different as a coach, Lars Kornetka recalls. “People relate to him because he has empathy. He’s a real father figure, he feels responsible for the players he coaches and will listen to their problems. Guys like Ba or Obasi are still regularly in touch with him years later because they value him so highly. You speak to someone like Gerald Asamoah (the former Schalke player) and he’ll tell you that Ralf is still there for him, happy to help out. One of the toughest things for him was to disappoint players who were good guys but not quite good enough on the pitch.”

What he couldn’t do, however, is compromise on his convictions. Hoffenheim’s flight of fancy hadn’t lasted after striker Vedad Ibisevic tore his anterior cruciate ligament but they still finished a respectable seventh. Rangnick had tasted blood. Hopp, though, wanted to consolidate. He sold Luiz Gustavo to Bayern Munich for €20 million behind his manager’s back. Rangnick resigned out of principle.

On September 22, 2011, his next adventure was all over. “After long and careful deliberations, I’ve decided that I need a break,” read the surprising statement. “It’s been a tough decision. But my energy levels are not sufficient enough to be successful.”

Eight months into his second spell with Schalke, a golden time that had brought his first major trophy, the DFB-Pokal, adulation from the crowd and progress to the semi-finals of the Champions League (where they were beaten by the last great Manchester United side), Rangnick was too physically and mentally exhausted to carry on. “Burnout syndrome,” was the clinical diagnosis. Weakened by glandular fever and an unhealthy long-hour lifestyle and diet, he couldn’t go on.

Many thought he was done with coaching when he accepted Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateschitz’s offer to do what he had done at Hoffenheim on a much more grandiose scale involving multiple football clubs. But Rangnick wasn’t done. When Leipzig needed a coach to step in at the beginning of 2015-16, Rangnick’s “best man for the job” policy led him to appoint… himself. He duly won promotion to the Bundesliga with Leipzig and stepped aside, content with overseeing the further development of the club, its players, and an increasing number of coaches who graduated from the Rangnick coaching university to get high-level jobs elsewhere.

Three years later, Rangnick repeated the trick, stepping into the breach for one campaign as Julian Nagelsmann was unable to extricate himself from Hoffenheim. He finished third and made it into the DFB-Pokal final, but lost 3-0 against Bayern.

Leipzig was his masterpiece, the realisation of his footballing ideas on the pitch and far beyond. But those who know him well say that there was a not-so-well hidden desire to go back onto the bench once more, and take on some of the managers he had partially inspired or directly fostered. Talks with Everton faltered when the Goodison Park hierarchy opted for Carlo Ancelotti. AC Milan came close but negotiations stalled when Stefano Pioli started winning. Chelsea offered him a four-month interim role before Thomas Tuchel’s appointment but Rangnick felt the time was too short to make a real impact. Others weren’t quite sure whether they wanted Rangnick as a coach or a sporting director.

As one of a handful of people who had done well in both roles, he was often perceived as overqualified and too scary a proposition for club officials in cushy roles. The German FA, too, preferred to go with Hansi Flick, a long-time FA employee, as Low’s successor rather than hand the keys to Rangnick, who might have turned over every stone in his relentless search for optimisation potential.

A figure close to Rangnick thinks the Manchester United job, another interim role, has come at a good time: “I wouldn’t say he’s become more mellow because he’s still incredibly driven, but he’s learned to delegate and trust other people.” The temporary nature of his employment and his clear focus on the first team’s fortunes will not create any friction upstairs, and at 63, Rangnick is experienced enough to handle big egos in the dressing room and help young players. With a bit of detailed coaching, Jadon Sancho should be a very different proposition in the next few months.

But most importantly, the godfather of the German coaching school will bring with him a vision of a United team playing organised, exciting, high-energy football. “To develop, educate and coach, you need to be sure what kind of football you need to play,” Rangnick told an audience of managers at The Coaches’ Voice conference in London in September. “That’s what all the top coaches in Europe have in common. They know what their football looks like, they have a video of the perfect game in their heads. The job is to transform that idea of football into the heads, hearts, brains and veins of the players. That’s motivation: the transfer of belief.”

Let the download begin.
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Piffiztheanswer said: ↵

Damn no more ManU fukkery
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Read that Ralf was meant to be at your club, but it feel through and that's why he ended up in Russia.

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DizeeGorilla20 said: ↵

29 is young to some people, I guess.
Mourinho and Wenger both revolutionized the English game when they arrived on the scene too. So that's a bit of a mute point to me because I wouldn't take either at United today.

Just answer these simple questions, please

Why has never managed Bayern, Dortmund or any other notable team in Europe?
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Rangnick rejects Bayern

His agent why it never went any further

"We do not believe that what Ralf Rangnick brings is currently what is being sought by Bayern. And that's why it makes no sense to hold concrete talks."
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And much like Bayern the Dortmund directors wouldnt give Rangnick the control that he wants. Dortmund's transfer policy about signing young players develop and sell for a healthy profit is basically the same thing Rangnick been doing for longer. Also Dortmund generally hire young coaches who are trending up. Doll Klopp Tuchel Rose Bosz etc...

Due to stress related illness previously Rangnick has been more DoF than a coach over the last decade. He knows that he isnt a long term coach anymore but he is perfect for a interim/till the end of the season position 1 year type deal which he done at Leipzig twice. But his principles and values of football are currently sitting 1st and 3rd in the PL.

DizeeGorilla20 said: ↵

Why has he never achieved anything close to the success that Klopp or Tuchel have?
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Simple. Klopp and Tuchel have had better players at their disposal.

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Kunty McPhuck said: ↵

Rangnick rejects Bayern

His agent why it never went any further

And much like Bayern the Dortmund directors wouldnt give Rangnick the control that he wants. Dortmund's transfer policy about signing young players develop and sell for a healthy profit is basically the same thing Rangnick been doing for longer. Also Dortmund generally hire young coaches who are trending up. Doll Klopp Tuchel Rose Bosz etc...

Due to stress related illness previously Rangnick has been more DoF than a coach over the last decade. He knows that he isnt a long term coach anymore but he is perfect for a interim/till the end of the season position 1 year type deal which he done at Leipzig twice. But his principles and values of football are currently sitting 1st and 3rd in the PL.

Simple. Klopp and Tuchel have had better players at their disposal.
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Fair enough. I said I would stop the slander till he gets into the job. Let's see if it will really be different this time.
Nov 25, 2021

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Piffiztheanswer said: ↵

Damn no more ManU fukkery
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I give it 6 months before the Green & Gold scarves come back out.

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TobiOT said: ↵

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imagine going on a stadium tour with harry maguire as your tour guide

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TobiOT said: ↵

Read that Ralf was meant to be at your club, but it feel through and that's why he ended up in Russia.
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Management stuck with padre pioli

Didnt wanna switch up so soon so it fell through. Plus i dont think they wanted to give that man all that power.

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Roberto Firmino said: ↵

Kloppo is a Sacchi disciple not Ralf
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Tell kloppo to field the U8's at San siro on Dec. 7th

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