Interview
Ralf Rangnick

Ralf Rangnick was recently appointed as the Head of Sports and Development at Russian side FC Lokomotiv Moscow. And somehow, it might seem fitting that the 63-year old Rangnick, nicknamed the “Football Professor”, is now to bestow his wisdom on a football culture that was for so long heavily inspired by one of his biggest role models in terms of tactical analysis, the Ukrainian coaching legend Valeriy Lobanovskyi, who sadly passed away in 2002.

It was back in 1983, on a cold winter’s day in February when Rangnick was player-manager at sixth-division hometown club FC Viktoria Backnang, that he first crossed paths with Lobanovskyi in a meeting that would form the basis of his footballing philosophy. “We had arranged a game against Dynamo Kiev, and from the beginning I had the feeling that something was different. It was as though they had an extra man and our players had no time. You were under pressure from three or four players at once. After the game, I was able to talk to Lobanovskyi through an interpreter and I asked him if I could watch their training sessions at a local sports school.“

Since then, Rangnick has developed into one of the brightest tactical minds in German football and he became one of the visionaries of zonal marking and pressing, the ball-oriented zonal marking technique. He has been a tremendous influence on German football and has played a big part in German coaches becoming some of the most sought-after commodities in modern football, with Thomas Tuchel, Marco Rose, Jürgen Klopp, Julian Nagelsmann and others all having been taught or at least been influenced by Rangnick.

Rangnick enjoyed tremendous success as a head coach, but also as a sports director and head of development for a number of smaller but also bigger, more established and more prestigious clubs in Germany. But he says he feels that clubs have generally benefitted most from his management skills when his responsibilities were more centred around building the club than simply being about what takes place on the pitch.

“I remember, all the way back to my first job in football with Viktoria Backnang in 1983, that I was more successful when I wasn’t working purely on coaching and training the players every day, but also was allowed to work on ‘club building’ and developing other areas as well,” he says.

Rangnick emphasises that in order to be sustainably successful, you need to have a plan for how to develop a club – a concept and strategy that has worked wonders at a number of his previous clubs, which he was able to take to the next level. This approach also worked well at amateur level at Viktoria Backnang, where Rangnick took over a team “where it was completely normal to drink alcohol or have a smoke after games. Within the space of four or five weeks, we had turned the team into a highly professional spirited one and were constantly instilling professional values and standards in the players, which became second nature to them after just two months,” he says.

Arguably, his greatest achievement came with RB Leipzig, where he fostered a vision anchored on youth supported by technological development and analysis to raise the standards in terms of recruitment and identifying young talent, turning Leipzig from a fourth-division regional side into a UEFA Champions League outfit.

“The successes at Leipzig were without precedent in the last hundred years and they won’t be repeated in the next hundred years, either. If you combine real teamwork with a clear plan based on guiding principles, have concrete ideas of how the whole thing should work and bring in the right employees, then you can actually make these things happen.”

At Leipzig, players underwent blood and saliva tests. They were also tested for gluten and lactose intolerances and allergies, and their diets were tailored to the results. Experts were also brought in to help them maximise the benefits of sleep.

This kind of data will become football’s next frontier according to Rangnick, and he says that in the future, success and failure will be determined by the quality of information available to teams.

“When I was head coach at Ulm (1997-1999), my assistant and I had to transfer video clips from one cassette to another for the debriefing of our match. Nowadays, there are video analysts and experts, and there are platforms that do this automatically at the touch of a button. So, the technical evolution has made it a lot easier for coaches.

“In terms of data, artificial intelligence will no doubt play an even more important role in the next few years, for example if Mainz 05 want to cause Bayern Munich problems or if you are the overwhelming favourites to beat a smaller team, as was the case recently at the Euros in the match between Germany and Hungary. Data plays a very important role, both in terms of scouting and in the tactical pre- and post-match analysis, but at the end of the day, it still depends on what the head coach and his coaching team do with the data. The way you analyse it is what sets coaches apart.”