Ralf Rangnick is one of the fathers of modern German football. His high-pressing, vertical game
is ubiquitous and those he’s influenced are in positions of power at clubs across the continent.
And now Rangnick has arrived at Manchester United as the interim head coach,
with a two-year consultancy brief which will begin in the summer.
But who is Ralf Rangnick?
Well, he wasn’t much of a midfielder. Released at the age of 25 by Ulm 1846, he would begin
his coaching career as player manager of provincial side FC Viktoria Backnang in 1983.
It’s where a chance encounter became a formative experience. A friendly against Dynamo Kyiv,
then coached by the legendary Valeriy Lobanovskyi, would be a lightbulb moment, with
Rangnick the player exposed to a stifling press, intensity without the ball and zonal marking.
"I felt constantly under pressure for the entire ninety minutes,"
he recalled in Raphael Hongistein’s Das Reboot. "It was the first time I sensed:
this is football of a very different kind."
The young Rangnick would make an annual pilgrimage to watch Lobonovskiy’s Kyiv train,
exposing himself to ideas which were well beyond the coaching syllabus of the
German Football Federation of the 1980s, where man-marking systems were gospel.
Another influence was Arrigo Sacchi. Sacchi set his hugely successful AC Milan teams out in a
back-four, at a time when German football was still wedded to the sweeper system.
These were the tenets of Ragnick’s footballing belief system;
it also made something of a heretic.
He faced other challenges. Despite coaching Stuttgart u21s to a youth championship in 1991,
he lacked the profile and experience for a more senior role and he would leave
the club in 1994, becoming the head-coach of third-tier Reutlingen the year after.
18 months wouldn’t quite produce a promotion, but it would earn Ragnick the manager’s job
back at former club Ulm, who he would take from the Regional Liga South to the Bundesliga by the
end of his second full season, the first time the club had reached the top-flight in its history.
Rangnick was achieving success with unfashionable clubs,
unknown players and no real money. With that came profile – and an appearance on
German television’s early precursor to modern day football programming: ZDF’s SportStudio. Tactical
discussion was unheard of and Rangnick became its face and, among those who felt attacked
by his new methods or envious of his status, earned the mocking nickname “the professor”.
Culture clashes would be a feature of his managerial career.
He would be appointed head-coach back at Stuttgart in 1999,
but would last just two years before being sacked. In 2001, he would drop down into
the 2.Bundesliga to win promotion with Hannover, but would lose his job in 2004.
And in 2005 he would finished as a Bundesliga runner-up with Schalke,
before deteriorating results the following year and strained internal relations
would see him sacked again after barely a year.
Rangnick was – and remains – a workaholic perfectionist whose vision for football
extended beyond the pitch and who desired a very broad and unusual influence.
It often created tension, but it’s also what informed the second act of his career.
In 2006, he became head coach at Hoffenheim, an upstart club from a village with a tiny
population, but with the financial patronage of billionaire Dietmar Hopp.
The club was in the third tier of German football and, in Rangnick’s words,
“a blank sheet of paper” – and it afforded a level of influence to which his personality was suited.
Rangnick believed in employing specialised support staff, like analysts and psychologists,
and also in aligning recruitment strategy to suit his form of the game. He wanted football to be
quick, intense and purposeful, and that require young, pliable players, preferably under-23.
By 2008, after two years, Rangnick and Hoffenheim were in the Bundesliga – and
making a name for themselves. They humbled Borussia Dortmund 4-1
in 2008 and would finish the season a respectable 7th.
“That's the kind of football we want to play one day,” remarked
opposing manager Jurgen Klopp after the defeat.
His time at Hoffenheim would end in acrimony and resignation after five years,
but he’d built a club and would get the chance to do it again. After six months at Schalke,
during which he reached a Champions League semi-final and a German Super Cup win,
he would reappear in June 2012 as the director of football for RB Leipzig and RB Salzburg.
It’s that body of work which now best defines Ragnick’s standing.
Leipzig’s journey from the fourth tier of German football to the Bundesliga
characterises a very literal form of success, but the identity of the football brand that
has been developed across the teams under the RB umbrella is the culmination of his ideas
The specialised coaches, the co-ordinated scouting and the swarming press and vertical football;
Ragnick may have left Red Bull in 2020,
but his ideas are now just part of the organisation’s sporting DNA.
His legacy continues to be developed and sustained by his disciples. Of the coaches he’s influenced,
identified or nurtured, Jurgen Klopp, Julian Nagelsmann and Thomas Tuchel are the stars,
but there’s also an entire generation of less known coaches, analysts and support staff who
share Ragnick’s technical philosophies and would likely be niche outsiders were it not for him.
It’s no exaggeration to call him one of the most influential figures in football’s modern history.