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He wouldn’t sign Ronaldo, avoids picking tattooed players and falls out with owners – but Rangnick is still t

By ROB DRAPER CHIEF FOOTBALL WRITER

Mateschitz, he was eventually persuaded to take on a sporting director role for Red Bull Salzburg and RB Leipzig. But when the Austrian team were knocked out of a Champions League qualifier by Luxembourg’s F91 Dudelange in his first game, Mateschitz told him: ‘I didn’t need to hire you Germans to do this badly, I could have managed that on my own.’

RANGNICK had installed Roger Schmidt as manager and signed an obscure Senegalese, Sadio Mane, from Metz. The team didn’t win the title that year but have won it every year since 2014. Meanwhile RB Leipzig rose from being a fourth-tier amateur club to making the Champions League semi-finals in 2020.

And if you want to recruit an obscure yet super-talented young player — which is the hardest thing do to in football — the chances are the Red Bull scouting system will be ahead of you. Mane, Erling Haaland, Naby Keita, Dayot Upamecano, Timo Werner were all signed early and cheap by the Red Bull clubs. They looked at Joe Gomez when he was 17, Callum Wilson when he was at Coventry and were in discussion with Jamie Vardy’s agent when he was still playing non-league at Fleetwood. At 25,

Rangnick considered him too old. Rangnick continued: ‘Back in 2012 Red Bull Salzburg had a squad with an average age of almost 30, by far the oldest in the league. Quite a few had come from Bayern Munich, who didn’t get a new contact there but could get another three years in Salzburg. They had players signing the last contract of their career.

From my experience, it’s better if you sign players in their first or maximum second contract of their career. Before 2012, players were at Salzburg and Leipzig because they are nice cities to live in and you knew the club won’t go bankrupt. But nothing to do with development of football. So we changed this completely and had an average age of 23.5, the youngest team in the league and most inexperienced. But everyone is completely hungry, they want to improve, they want to win.’

Rangnick may be considered a visionary, but rather like Marcelo Bielsa, he has a habit of falling out with people who wish to compromise his vision. He does, however, share an idol with Manchester City coach Guardiola. ‘When I was young boy I was urging my coach let me play with No14. And the coach said: “But then you’re a sub!” But I would say: “No, let me play from the start with No14 because it is Johan Cruyff’s number.” Johan was the first modern No10. He scored goals, he gave assists and, not in same way we expect but if he was in the mood, he would take part in winning the ball back. He was not like Gunter Netzer [the star of Germany’s 1974 World Cup winners, who beat Cruyff’s Holland] or other No10s.’ If you can imagine what it was like for a 16-year-old German boy in 1974 to idolise Cruyff rather than Netzer, you begin to get to the nub of the iconoclast. Rangnick was a mediocre player, a trait he shares in common with the Stuttgart school of coaches which now dominate the Premier League, led by himself, Klopp and Thomas Tuchel and with Julian Nagelsmann, another protege at Bayern Munich.

It was Tuchel’s good fortune to fall under his mentorship while a third division player at Ulm. It was Tuchel’s misfortune to be injured just as Rangnick was proving his football genius. Rangnick’s big idea was to abandon man marking, to stop playing a back three (which was de rigueur in Germany).

When Rangnick’s playing career had finally exhausted the limits of his talent, pretty much by the time he was 25, he turned out for his home-town team Viktoria Backnang, a non-league German team, who, by chance, played a mid-winter friendly in 1984 against Dynamo Kiev coached by Valeriy Lobanovskyi.

If the likes of Bielsa and Rangnick have been hailed as the fathers of modern football, then Lobanovskyi and AC Milan’s Arrigo Sacchi were the grandfathers of what we see today. Rangnick was both perplexed and fascinated with Lobanovskyi’s zonal marking and pressing system. It was this tactical lightbulb moment that saw Rangnick’s star rise as he climbed from the third tier to the Bundesliga with Ulm. That earned him the VfB Stuttgart job but also lumbered him with the sarcastic ‘Professor’ nickname.

He won the Intertoto Cup with Stuttgart and then repeated his Bundesliga promotion trick with Hannover 96, before moving to Schalke, the third-biggest team in Germany, where he was popular with fans but fell out with the board. He was recuperating in Backnang when the call from Hopp came but he left Hoffenheim when they decided to sell his star striker, Luiz Gustavo, to Bayern Munich when he wanted to push for the title, having finished seventh. It was during this period that Klopp, in his early, difficult days at Borussia Dortmund, told his players that Rangnick’s team were the gold standard after they lost 4-1 to Hoffenheim in 2008.

Rangnick now has to get to where Klopp is and to match his old apprentice Tuchel. Still, he will take that self-assurance of being the smartest person in the room with him into the job. And in the Manchester United boardroom, he can be certain that he will be.

United are not a pressing team. It could turn out to be a disaster

All Change At United

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2021-11-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-11-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

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