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 technical director John Murtough had 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 Murtaugh 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 convictions 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 indeed commissioned the dossier.

This time there was no doubt about United’s intentions, with Rangnick 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 ten 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 Coaches’ Voice in 2018. “Players follow you as a manager if they feel that you make them better. That’s the greatest, most sincere motivation there is.” And it works both ways.

Unbeknownst 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 VfB 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 ten hours a day, including two in the gym and two for tactical moves. Other sports were lightyears 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 too could reach higher levels of performance.


Rangnick at Ulm in the 1998/99 season (Photo: PICTURE POINT/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
After he was released by SSV Ulm 1846 at the age of 25, Rangnick turned out for his home town side FC 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 modern football’s steadily increasing number of specialised roles. 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 on his career. There, he found people doing tasks simply because they had done them for a long time and everyone had become used to having them around. There was no quality control, no sense of people striving to improve, no challenge to their tried and trusted ways.

Schalke 04’s patriarchal club boss Rudi Assauer — who was rarely caught without a big cigar in his mouth — mocked Rangnick for busying himself with every minutiae 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 [S04] 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 Lobanvoskiy’s Dynamo Kiev at their 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 Kiev 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 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 Helmut Gross, a trained structural engineer turned self-taught maverick coach who had introduced his version of “Ballorientierte Raumdeckung”, a system combining zonal marking and pressing to lower league football in Germany’s south-west, began writing coaching guidelines for the regional federation. Gross was eventually made head of development of VfB Stuttgart in 1989 and Rangnick won the German youth championship as coach of their U21s two years later.

He had taken inspiration from Arrigo Sacchi’s AC Milan, watching video tapes 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 ex-pro CV.


Rangnick talks to a fan in his time at Stuttgart (Photo: Mark Sandten/Bongarts/Getty Images)
But big German clubs still proved reluctant to promote a virtual no-name to first team roles. 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 SSV 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 won 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.

Rangnick was taken aback by the criticism. “What I said was pretty banal by international standards but others saw it as an attack.” He regretted going on air for a long time but also admitted that he couldn’t have turned down the opportunity. Ever the teacher, he wanted to explain the workings of his football to the maximum amount 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 VfB 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 said changes threatened the existing order. Rangnick’s reformist zeal lost traction amid the complex power structure of a club that’s never quite happy at the best of times. He didn’t enjoy VfB’s full backing when he suspended Krassimir 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 can handle those type 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 set-back, forcing a step back. He went down a division to take over Hannover 96. But he was soon up again, guiding his new team to the Bundesliga in 2001/02. A fall-out with the club’s hierarchy led to his dismissal in 2004 and the aforementioned ill-fated intermezzo at Schalke, where he won over the crowd but not his superiors.

Another re-beginning further down the ladder proved a breakthrough of sorts. 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. Rangnick did so, with his team playing a kind of game that had never been seen in the German top flight before. Hoffenheim, made up of niche, mostly local players that had been overlooked by other German sides and foreign unknowns like Brazilians Carlos Eduardo and Luiz Gustavo, Nigerian 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 of Hoffenheim’s meeting with Bayern 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 a maximum of mental pressure in order 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,” Helmut Gross said. “They were mostly young, U23s, 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.”


Rangnick loved Gustavo and was devastated when he left (Photo: Alex Grimm/Bongarts/Getty Images)
In public, Rangnick sometimes came across as a little dour. But he was very different as a coach, 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.”

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 ACL 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 Rangnick’s back, and 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 current energy levels are not sufficient to be successful and to move the team and the club forward.”

Eight months into his second spell with Schalke, a golden time that had brought his first major trophy, the DFB Pokal, adulation from the S04 crowd and progress to the semi-final of the Champions League (where they were beaten by last great Manchester United side), Rangnick was too physically and mentally exhausted to carry on. “Burn-out 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 RB needed a coach to step in as their preferred choice and Ralph Hasenhuttl wasn’t available for another season 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 amount 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.

RB 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, deep 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 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 over-qualified 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 to hand the keys to Rangnick who might have turned over every stone in his relentless search for optimisation potential.


Rangnick celebrates promotion with Leipzig (Photo: Boris Streubel/Bongarts/Getty Images)
Somebody 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 clear focus on the first team’s fortunes will not create any friction upstairs, and at 63, Rangnick is both 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. “In order to develop, educate and coach your own team, 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.

(Top image: Sam Richardson)