Julian Nagelsman, 29, 4th in Bundesliga

[Uilleam 5,924]

From today's Times

 

An interview with the 29 yo coach of Hoffenheim, currently 4th in Bundesliga.

Interesting stuff, esp when we think of the vacant post(s) @Ibrox, and some of the clamour (sources various, not so much on here) for one of the usual suspects.

 

Even if this guy is just lucky, recall Bonaparte, who declared

“I know he's a good general, but is he lucky?”

 

 

JULIAN NAGELSMANN INTERVIEW

Young coach uses drones to find a winning formula

At only 29, Julian Nagelsmann is younger than his Hoffenheim players but the graduate has the maturity to succeed

 

James Gheerbrant

February 27 2017, 12:01am,

The Times

 

Nagelsmann’s team did not lose this season until late January and remain fourth in the Bundesliga despite a draw away to Schalke yesterday

 

You never know quite where the next great football manager is going to come from. Arsène Wenger stepped off a plane from Japan and into history. José Mourinho graduated to greatness from the interpreter’s backroom at Barcelona. Jorge Sampaoli began at the foot of the Argentine league pyramid while working as a bank cashier.

 

To meet the man who might be next in that lineage, you have to drive an hour from Frankfurt, deep into the rolling farmland of Baden-Württemberg, down small country roads through fields dotted with hay-bales and cows, until it feels as though you are as far away from the cutting edge of football as you can possibly get.

 

To understand why, in February last year, Hoffenheim appointed Julian Nagelsmann, a 28-year-old sports-science graduate who never played a senior professional game, you need to understand the club itself. Hoffenheim is a village of 3,300 people. The club were playing in the amateur fifth division as recently as 2000, before rising to the Bundesliga thanks to the financial and technological backing of the mogul Dietmar Hopp, a software entrepreneur. The entire club is a rebuke to football’s received wisdom of what is possible, and how fast; a triumph of arriviste forward-thinking over the naysayers. Nobody thought they could get to the Bundesliga. Nobody thought they could stay there. And nobody thought they were right to appoint Nagelsmann.

 

“A public relations stunt,” declaimed the local newspaper Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung. The Frankfurter Rundschau called it “a crackpot idea”.

 

But one year on from Nagelsmann’s appointment, the success has been extraordinary. When Nagelsmann — who turned to coaching after injury ended his playing career aged 20 — took over, Hoffenheim were 17th in the Bundesliga, seven points from safety. They won seven of their final 14 games to stay up, and this season, after 22 games, they are fourth. They didn’t lose their first match until January 28, making them the last undefeated team in any of Europe’s top five leagues.

 

Nagelsmann’s age is practically unprecedented for a top-flight coach in a major European league. He is the youngest permanent manager in Bundesliga history and even a year after his appointment is still three years younger than the Premier League’s youngest-ever manager, Attilio Lombardo. Did he ever wonder if it might be too much, too soon?

 

“Since I started out as a coach very early, it was clear that if I got an opportunity, it would likely be as a very young coach. The probability, should I become a Bundesliga manager, that I would be under 35, was quite high,” he says. “That the chance came so early obviously took me by surprise, but I never had the fear that I was too young. I felt ready for it. The only small misgiving that I had was, ‘I hope we can turn the corner.’ But it had nothing to do with my age, and everything to do with the situation that we found ourselves in.”

 

 

Nagelsmann belongs to the coterie of German managers who have in common a limited playing career and an intellectual approach to management

ALEX GRIMM/BONGARTS/GETTY IMAGES

Still, it must have been daunting coming into a dressing room in which five players — goalkeeper Alexander Stolz, midfielders Eugen Polanski, Pirmin Schwegler and Kai Herdling, and striker Kevin Kurányi — were older than him.

 

“It’s something you have to consider, how you’re going to deal with players who are older than you,” Nagelsmann admits. “You can’t be too authoritarian; you have to try to take them along with you, perhaps be a bit more matey than an older manager might be. But I also aspired to convince them inwardly. When a player realises that you can make him better, that your ideas can make him better, then they will follow and you will have authority.”

 

There was also an unusual practical hurdle to be negotiated. In Germany, it is common for players to refer to their manager as ‘trainer’ using the formal second-person pronoun sie. Given Nagelsmann’s age, though, that created an awkward dynamic.

 

“I thought it would be weird if I told Eugen Polanski, who is a year older than me, that he had to call me sie,” Nagelsmann explains. “I don’t think you lose a shred of authority that way.”

 

There was a perception that Nagelsmann was a coaching academic, and some eyebrows were raised further when, in August, he gave an interview to Süddeutsche Zeitung in which he theorised that management was “30 per cent tactics, 70 per cent social competence”.

 

“What I meant is that if you’re fundamentally a very good manager, but have little sense of how to lead people, then you’ll only have a certain amount of success,” Nagelsmann, who took four semesters of business administration before switching to sports science, explains. “If you’re a fantastic leader of men, who can create a really positive mood, but you’re not fundamentally the best manager, you may nonetheless be able to get around it. At the end of the day, a player who doesn’t always do everything right but whose heart is always in it is far more effective than a player who does everything 100 per cent correctly but with only 50 per cent emotional investment.”

 

Nagelsmann belongs to the coterie of German managers, including Jürgen Klopp, Thomas Tuchel of Borussia Dortmund (who coached him in Augsburg’s second team), and Bayer Leverkusen’s Roger Schmidt, who have in common a limited playing career and an intellectual approach to management. Nagelsmann, though, is taking it to extremes.

 

Hoffenheim use highly specialised data such as the time each player spends in the deckungsschatten — the ‘marking shadow’, where they are blocked from receiving the ball by opponents. Drones videotape their training sessions. So avant garde are Nagelsmann’s methods that the progressive Schmidt sneered, “You think you’ve invented football, do you?” during a touchline contretemps.

 

“Coaching is becoming ever more scientific — through all the data that you get nowadays, and the developments in sport science,” Nagelsmann says. “Coaches need an ever more scientific background. It’s not a fundamental pre-requisite, just like it’s not a pre-requisite for a manager to have played the game professionally, but it helps when you’re looking at the computerised analysis — some of the solutions that they present can be very complex. If you’ve encountered data before in your life, it makes your life as a manager a lot easier.”

 

You might think all this forensic analysis would lead to a rather dry football-by-numbers, but you’d be wrong. Hoffenheim have scored 39 goals this season, the fourth-most in the Bundesliga, and there is an interesting creative tension in Nagelsmann’s philosophy between science and art.

 

THE NEW WAVE

Highest-placed homegrown managers aged under 45 ranked by league ladder position

English leagues

Eddie Howe 39, Bournemouth, 14th

Garry Monk 37, Leeds United, 24th

Paul Heckingbottom 39, Barnsley 30th

Lee Johnson 35, Bristol City, 41st

Paul Warne 43, Rotherham, 44th

German Bundesliga

Thomas Tuchel 43, Borussia Dortmund, 3rd

Julian Nagelsmann 29, Hoffenheim, 4th

Markus Weinzieri 42, Schalke, 12th

Manuel Baum 37, Augsburg, 13th

Alexander Nouri 37, Werder Bremen, 15th

Spanish leagues

Marcelo Romero 40, Málaga, 13th

Víctor Sánchez del Amo 41, Real Betis, 15th

Gaizka Garitano 41, Deportivo La Coruña, 17th

Pablo Machin 41, Girona, 22nd

José Luis Martí 41, Tenerife, 24th

Italian leagues

Simone Inzaghi 40, Lazio, 5th

Vincenzo Montella 42, AC Milan, 7th

Giovanni Martusciello 45, Empoli, 17th

Davide Nicola 43, Crotone, 19th

Fabio Pecchia 43, Verona, 24th

 

 

“It’s very important for me to play attractive football,” he says. “Football is entertainment after all. In the current moment, where money is so important, where people have to work several jobs to make a living, I always have the aspiration that spectators should go away from our games thinking, that was a nice game to watch. I stand strongly for the fact that we take risks, we seize the initiative, we play with courage.”

 

Courage is a recurring word in conversation with Nagelsmann. He wants his players to show courage. He thinks English clubs should show courage in appointing young, homegrown managers and believes that the hardships of his own personal journey instilled in him a quality the Germans call lebensmut – the courage to face life.

 

When Nagelsmann was 16, he left home in the Bavarian village of Issing to move to Munich, where he was on the academy books at 1860 Munich. But his junior career was full of injury setbacks as he struggled to overcome persistent knee problems. When he was 20, his father died and he found himself tasked with selling the family home and finding a new house for his mother. Shortly after that, he was told his playing career was over.

 

“When you have invested a lot of time in becoming a professional player, and that dream bursts, it’s hard to cope with,” he says. “With what was going on in my personal life too, maybe it did force me to grow up faster — to retain the courage to face life. I’m probably not a typical 29-year-old.”

 

Nagelsmann looks, despite it all, even younger than his tender years. “I feel young,” he says. “I’ve got energy swilling around in me. I feel mature, but I don’t feel old. I feel ready.”

 

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/the-game/i-never-feared-i-was-too-young-i-felt-ready-for-it-n7cl6w2l8

Edited February 27, 2017 by Uilleam

[Ser Barristan Selmy 222]

Going off at a tangent maybe, but with regards to us a young coach with bright eyes would be wonderful. The problem is that without a proven track record and considerable experience, we're likely to end up with yet another dud. Mind you, most of the names being linked are so poor that I'd be open to anything.

 

I think the key change is getting the infrastructure in place so a coach can come and go and we don't end up rebuilding from scratch again. Put that in place and appointing a young coach doesn't become such a big risk. He can quickly be changed.

 

I think we'll end up with some poor Scottish manager who will need replaced again in a year or 2.

Edited February 27, 2017 by Ser Barristan Selmy

[Uilleam 5,924]

Going off at a tangent maybe, but with regards to us a young coach with bright eyes would be wonderful. The problem is that without a proven track record and considerable experience, we're likely to end up with yet another dud. Mind you, most of the names being linked are so poor that I'd be open to anything.

 

I think the key change is getting the infrastructure in place so a coach can come and go and we don't end up rebuilding from scratch again. Put that in place and appointing a young coach doesn't become such a big risk. He can quickly be changed.

 

I think we'll end up with some poor Scottish manager who will need replaced again in a year or 2.

 

I generally agree with your sentiments.

 

When said manager is replaced it will be a monstrous disruption, with manager, back room staff and coaches going, all new personnel brought in, and a subsequent cull of playing

staff necessitating a barrow load of new recruits.

Hence, I think the DoF route with a Head Coach is worth exploring. At very least it should make the process of change easier to handle.

 

Oh, and I don't think that Nagelsman is merely lucky.

Edited February 27, 2017 by Uilleam