The Sunday Times - UK (2021-11-28)

8 November 28, 2021The Sunday Times 2GS

Football

Graeme

Souness

United have been

easy to roll over

this year — that’s

a collective

thing. Against

Liverpool they

were a shambles

Solskjaer has to hold his hands up.

He claims that they are in a better

place, but I’m not sure how when he

has won nothing and José Mourinho,

his predecessor, won the Europa

League and the League Cup. Several

of the same players who got

Mourinho the sack are still there. I

said back then that Anthony Martial

was in the last chance saloon, so who

decided to keep him and sell Romelu

Lukaku in 2019? There’s so much

excess baggage at the club dragging

them down to mediocrity.

A good football judge would have

worked that out and that’s the biggest

job for the next man: getting rid of

these players. You may end up paying

a portion of their wages to get them

out the door because they are

average players who are not going to

be wanted by other big clubs yet are

all on serious money. This is not a

quick fix. They need proper football

people to guide them because their

recruitment has been shocking.

Darren Fletcher, the technical

director, is a step in that direction,

but is he experienced enough at 37?

I was on a wing and a prayer when

I became player-manager at Rangers

at 33, then, at 38, I am managing

Liverpool and it’s all too soon for me.

I’d had five years at Rangers of buying

and selling players and making

decisions, but when I moved to

Liverpool I was still not ready for it.

I’d have taken Cristiano Ronaldo

all day long, but I’d also have had a

honest conversation with him:

“You’ll get plenty of game time, but

Mediocre

United squad

is carrying

baggage of

years of

shocking

signings

The most important thing to get right

at a football club is recruitment, and

Manchester United have shown how

to do it badly. It doesn’t matter if you

are Sir Alex Ferguson, Jürgen Klopp

or Pep Guardiola, if your players are

not good enough, you’re not going to

be challenging for trophies. Playing

for a big club, earning a big salary

does not make you a big player.

That begs the question of who’s

responsible for the recruitment

because that’s where the biggest

problem lies at United. Since Fergie

stepped down, they have had people

with no football knowledge making

calls about who to buy and who to

sell. They can’t just dive in and get it

all wrong again when they appoint

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s permanent

successor. Ralf Rangnick, as interim

manager, will provide a different

voice, but he hasn’t worked in British

football before.

You have to look further up the

tree than the coach because

whoever you get in is going to have

to work with this group of players

and the people who make the

decisions about who stays, who goes

and who to buy. Ed Woodward, the

executive vice-chairman, and his

acolytes have to take their share of

the blame. If he’s been delegating to

someone else, then get rid of them

because it’s a mess.

Was Ferguson consulted when

United paid a British transfer record

of £89.3 million to bring Paul Pogba

back from Juventus in 2016? He was

prepared to let him leave, and

doesn’t tend to let players he rates go

without a fight, so might it have made

sense to ask him why before

committing millions to that deal?

United have spent more than

£1 billion since Ferguson left in 2013.

Solskjaer spent £100 million more

than Manchester City in his three

years in charge and over £300 million

more than Liverpool, who made a

small profit over the same period, yet

United are still a country mile away

w from Chelsea, Liverpool and City, so

ILLUSTRATION: JAMES COWEN

S

ometimes, a person lives up

to the hype and when I

interviewed Ralf Rangnick

via Zoom from his home in

Leipzig nine months ago, it

hit me between the eyes: his

conviction, intelligence, gift

for communication and

charisma.

He described his friend and co-

prophet of gegenpressing, Jürgen

Klopp, as a menschenfänger —

someone who can just capture others

— but, two baby boomers born 19

miles apart in Swabia and both star

pundits on German television before

focusing on coaching, he and Klopp

seem cut from similar cloth.

It appears Manchester United were

as Rangnick-ed as I was when their

executives interviewed potential

interim managers. The 63-year-old

blew competitors such as Ernesto

Valverde and Rudi Garcia away. He

captivated a panel led by Ed

Woodward, the United executive

vice-chairman, and football director,

John Murtough, in talks at United’s

Mayfair offices on Tuesday.

Having negotiated his release from

Lokomotiv Moscow, where he was

head of sports and development,

Rangnick awaits work-permit

clearance to begin tackling a

fascinating brief: six months as

United’s stand-in coach, followed by

two years as a consultant.

He is being invited first to mend

the club’s football, then move from

workshop to design room and

produce a blueprint to prevent it

getting broken again. Both are

steepling tasks in their own right, yet

Rangnick’s unique history suggests

he might just pull them off.

His playing principles, once

revolutionary, now underpin the

very best teams: ball-orientated

marking, group pressing and instant,

intense attacking. United will switch

on, at long last, to the running game.

While it is true that philosophies as

detailed as Rangnick’s and Klopp’s

take months to fully impart, it is a

fallacy to think the best teachers —

such as them — cannot affect teams

profoundly in the short as well as

long term.

Our interview with Rangnick took

place on February 8. Thomas Tuchel

had been at Chelsea for only 13 days

yet Rangnick observed: “It is obvious

they will have an upward trajectory.

I’m sure they’ll finish in the top four.”

He explained you only had to watch

Tuchel’s first couple of games to see

Chelsea “now have a mutual plan for

when they have the ball or the other

team has the ball — you see what it

was they lacked before”.

Tuchel is Rangnick’s foremost

protégé, his former player with Ulm,

who was working in a bar and

studying economics at university

when Rangnick made him coach of

Stuttgart’s under-15s.

Chelsea actually offered Rangnick

their manager’s job when Frank

Lampard departed. He gave a

Tuchel is his No 1 protégé and Klopp

his ally but can Ralf Rangnick solve a

problem like United in a few months?

Jonathan Northcroft

MIND THE GAP

Chelsea’s biggest leads over Man Utd

after 12 PL games (points difference)

2014

2021

2004

2019

2016

2018

2005

13

12

11

10

9

8

7

sparkling 90-minute interview by

video with Petr Cech and Marina

Granovskaia but they wanted him for

only four months, with it clear that

Tuchel was their preferred long-term

candidate. So Rangnick stepped

aside. He told me, “I can only

congratulate Thomas and Chelsea for

the choice.”

That seemed to typify his evident

lack of self-importance. He describes

himself primarily as an educator

(“Teaching is what life’s about — why

should I keep my knowledge to

myself ?”) and throughout his career

he has toggled between coach and

sporting director, not feeling the

need to always be in the limelight. He

said, however, that if he came to the

Premier League it would have to be,

initially, as a manager.

“The problem in England is the job

of sporting director in a German

sense does not exist. Even Txiki

[Begiristain], one of the most

powerful sporting directors in

England — I don’t see Txiki at any

stage sacking Pep [Guardiola] or

doing something against Pep’s

wishes.

“It means if I want to work in

England, my focus would have to be

as a head coach, which is no problem

because I love working as a head

coach and in the English model the

coach is also involved in the

planning, recruitment and decisions

at the club. I feel I could start

[affecting things] from day one.”

Rangnick last coached at RB

Leipzig, in 2018-19, finishing third in

the Bundesliga and reaching the

German Cup final. As interim with

Schalke, in 2011, he won the German

Supercup and reached the

Champions League semi-final. There,

he lost to a United side featuring

Michael Carrick and Darren Fletcher

and in Carrick — caretaker-manager

until his arrival — Rangnick will find a

studious and committed young

coach, the type he has had a knack

for apprenticing. An astonishing

seven of the top 11 clubs in the

Bundesliga (before this weekend’s

games) have head coaches who once

worked for Rangnick.

Fletcher, starting out as a technical

director, can also be developed.

When Rangnick moves into his

consultancy phase it could get

crowded with he, Fletcher and

Murtough all trying to do strategy,

but Rangnick told me: “I am a team

player. I know my reputation is

different, but it is just not true.” He

admitted being single-minded in

roles with Hoffenheim and, during an

initial phase, Leipzig, “but only

because the owners asked me to

bring their clubs to the highest

possible level as soon as possible and

therefore I could not just wait for

things to happen. But all we achieved

was as a result of a team that worked

together.”

With Hoffenheim, as head coach,

Rangnick hauled the club from

regional football to the top half of the

Bundesliga. His brief at Leipzig was to

bring about a similar leap while

simultaneously, as Red Bull’s director

of football, making the company’s

Austrian club, Salzburg, successful in

Europe. He began in 2012-13 and by

the end of season five, Salzburg were

Europa League semi-finalists, having

discovered and developed talents

such as Sadio Mané, Dayot

Upamecano, Patson Daka, Duje

Caleta-Car and Takumi Minamino.

Soon, he would sign for them Erling

Haaland.

Meanwhile, Leipzig had jumped

from Germany’s fourth tier to the

higher echelons of the Bundesliga

and, there, Rangnick’s recruitment

successes included Joshua Kimmich

and Naby Keita. It’s worth noting that

Klopp has six Rangnick-produced

players in his Liverpool squad (Mané,

Keita, Roberto Firmino, Joel Matip,

Ibrahima Konaté and Minamino).

Rangnick’s ideas around what to look

for in talents are compelling.

Top of his list are “mentality” and

“cognition”. “In football it has

become more and more important

you have those factors,” he said.

“That you have emotional

intelligence, the will to get better

every day. That you are pissed off to

even lose a 4 v 4 in training.

“Haaland and Kimmich are good

examples, also Mané and Firmino.

“On the other side there is

cognition. When Naby was playing

for us, whenever he got the ball he

knew in advance, in a 360-degree

radar around himself, where are my

team-mates, where are the other

team’s players? He never had to look

over his shoulder. He felt it.”

For all his experiences and insights,