Manchester United’s managerial position has been one of the most difficult to manage in the world of football for years, and is perhaps the most complicated of all right now. Since Alex Ferguson retired in 2013 after 27 consecutive years on the bench and thirty titles, no one has managed to create another winning cycle, despite the club having everything to do it: money, facilities, skills and tradition. Four have tried in eight years and the last one, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, was sacked at the end of November. Since 2013 only José Mourinho has brought new titles – three: Europa League, League Cup and Community Shield – but without building anything solid: he too had had to give up his position well before the expiration of the contract.
To save a compromised season and give a new direction to a club that so far did not seem to have one, United called German Ralf Rangnick, much more than just a manager. Rangnick will coach United until the end of the current season and then become a club consultant, kind of like he was doing at Lokomotiv Moscow, as he had previously done with great results between Hoffenheim and the Red Bull project, and as he should have done at Milan if last year the club had not decided to confirm Stefano Pioli, for the unexpectedly excellent results.
When we talk about Rangnick we are not talking only of a coach, but of a manager who can be on the sidelines as in the stands, alongside a single team or in a large corporate group, following projects made by several clubs scattered around the world. ‘Europe or for the world. If German football has managed to keep up with the times, sometimes in front of everyone, much is due to him: there is no successful coach who grew up in Germany in the last decade who has not been influenced even partially by his work.
Made this in March: the Ralf Rangnick coaching tree. A group of coaches he has inspired / influenced at various clubs throughout his career. List includes Julian Nagelsmann, Marco Rose, Jesse Marsch and more. pic.twitter.com/ax4OFnFUTP
— Karan Tejwani (@karan_tejwani26) November 25, 2021
Between the seventies and eighties he was a semi-professional player, not so gifted as to make the leap of the category. Even before he finally stopped playing, he started coaching in the German minor leagues, where in 1983 he had what he still calls today “a football epiphany”. While playing and at the same time coaching little Viktoria Backnang, he found himself playing a friendly match (it was winter and the championships of the coldest countries were stopped) against Valeri Lobanovski’s Dynamo Kiev, one of the most important coaches of the twentieth century.
The innovative playing style of the Ukrainians, consisting mostly of a choral pressing at the time not so easy to see, was a great inspiration. In the following years he incorporated in his game model the most distinctive traits of Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan and also of Zdenek Zeman’s Foggia: zone marking, passing and movements, intensity of play.
He then began to climb the series of the German championship, passing through the Stuttgart reserve team, where he met Helmut Gross, the mentor with whom he formed what in Germany they call “the Stuttgart school”. From there Rangnick and Gross continued to work together perfecting their ideas, which already at the time caused discussion: in 1998 Rangnick ended up explaining them on German national television, and to some he gave the impression of being too bold and innovative.
In the early 2000s, with Stuttgart and Hannover, he won his first career titles, to which were then added those with Schalke 04, coached in two different periods. However, it was in 2006 that he worked on one of the most successful projects. That year he was in fact called by Hoffenheim, a team from a small town of 35,000 inhabitants (Sinsheim) personally managed by the German billionaire Dietmar Hopp.
There Rangnick established the first vertical management model in German football, organizing the first team, youth sector, transfer strategy and sporting direction as one, aided by the still small size of the club. The whole society took as a model the style of play characterized by rhythmic pressing, ball circulation and defensive solidity and applied it to each of its strategies, also avoiding, when possible, to buy already trained players over 23 years old.
The direction given by Rangnick, then implemented with the introduction of technologies applied to sports practice by the knowledge of Hopp, creator of the SAP management software, in the space of three years Hoffenheim started from the third league, was promoted to the second division and arrived in Bundesliga, where he has never moved since and where he often finishes among the top of the standings.
After his second experience at Schalke 04, which in 2011 led to the best placement in the Champions League in its history – also achieved thanks to a historic 5-2 trimmed against Inter in the quarter-finals – he was given the opportunity to replicate what he had done at the ‘Hoffenheim, but on an even larger scale.
Together with Gérard Houllier, former coach of Liverpool, Lyon and the French national team, he later became one of the managers of investments in football for the Austrian multinational Red Bull. He was given both managerial and managerial positions. Unlike Houllier, supervisor of the global project from New York to Ghana, Rangnick worked more specifically in Leipzig and Salzburg, contributing to the creation of two modern, spectacular and distinctly offensive teams, today among the most influential in Europe.
Over the course of his career Rangnick has inspired an entire generation of coaches, a bit like Arrigo Sacchi did in Italy at the time. Today the German coaching school is one of the most popular: just think that only in the Premier League – a league that relies almost exclusively on foreign skills when it comes to coaching – Liverpool and Chelsea are both led by Germans. Jürgen Klopp is the coach he is today also because in 2008, on the Borussia Dortmund bench, he lost a championship match 4-1 against Rangnick’s Hoffenheim and was impressed to the point that he said: “We have to get to where they are now. “.
Tuchel, the last European champion with Chelsea, was both coached and initiated into a coaching career by Rangnick, at the time of Ulma, after a serious knee injury. Rangnick recently recalled: “I gave him a job as an Under 15 coach. To think he didn’t even want to do it, he worked in a Stuttgart bar.”
In the next six months Rangnick will face both Klopp and Tuchel with Manchester United, a team that has so far been in a crisis of identity and results. With Solskjaer the club had tried to take a direction using a former player of his, who therefore knew the environment well, to create a leading group of players who had grown up in Manchester or in the team for many years. The project, however, did not give results and now Rangnick will be asked to resume it starting from the tactical settings of the team, so far criticized for their weakness. At the end of the season, if all goes as planned, Rangnick will leave room for a new manager who will be chosen in these months, while he will continue to follow the sporting direction a bit as he did in the past in Germany.
– Read also: Red Bull is also succeeding in Brazil
