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Manchester United will be in safe hands for the remainder of the season after Ralf Rangnick signs a short-term contract as interim manager for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
United still have Mauricio Pochettino and Brendan Rodgers in their sights for the summer but have always been open to the appointment of an interim to give themselves more time and flexibility later to pursue one of their preferred permanent options.
Rangnick will pilot the ship for the remainder of the season and is also said to have agreed to a two-year advisory role that will give him a voice at Old Trafford until 2024.
This is a coach whose reputation has been built on player development and tactical proficiency.
Rangnick wasn’t a significant player. Coming from Baden-Württemberg in southwest Germany, he joined the youth of the regional powerhouse Stuttgart, but never got beyond the reserve team. After a short stay in England, which he combined with a year of study at the University of Sussex, he returned to Germany, but remained largely in BW.
Rangnick’s coaching career also had humble beginnings. He was in his early thirties when he was employed as a player-coach at the home club Viktoria Backnang, before he worked for various other clubs around BW – including three times in Stuttgart at different levels.
But he trained in a certain way since his late teens and has been known in Germany as a “soccer professor” since 1998, viewed by many as a tactical genius.
Rangnick won Germany’s fourth league with Ulm in 1998; he had been a coach and manager for 15 years – he still hadn’t left the comfort of BW. He was still less than 12 months later when he landed his first top job in Stuttgart and took over the first team, having previously headed the reserves and the U19s for several years.
Stuttgart jumped on his watch into the upper half of the Bundesliga and entered the UEFA Cup by taking a place above the Intertoto Cup. In 2001 he was fired, but quickly found a new job at Hannover in the second division and rebuilt it as a Bundesliga club.
Rangnick’s next chance was at Schalke, where he replaced Jupp Heynckes in the 2004/05 season, who was runner-up in the Bundesliga and the DFB Cup at Bayern Munich.
His legacy of building the club probably began with Hoffenheim when he switched to the ambitious national league team in 2006. Rangnick was only a little over a year away from second place in the Bundesliga and had made the Champions League by the end of 2005, but fell into the third tier for the project, which was responsible for five years and overseeing successive promotions.
Under his leadership, Hoffenheim achieved its Bundesliga football ambitions and has not been promoted from the top division since then. Rangnick finally left in 2011 after cementing the club’s position over several seasons, and it’s the longest time he’s head coach in his nearly 40-year career.
“What we did in Hoffenheim had a big impact on German football,” Rangnick told ESPN last year. “I remember that in our first year in the Bundesliga in 2008 we played against Borussia Dortmund under Jürgen Klopp and we dominated 4-1.
“It could easily have been six or seven because we kept putting them under pressure throughout the game. In the following week Jürgen said that he would like to play exactly this style of football with Dortmund in the future.
After Hoffenheim returned to Schalke in 2011, he took over until well into the second half of the 2010/11 season. The club had already reached the DFB Cup final, which they won, but Rangnick also managed a Champions League quarter-final win against defending champions Inter to score a semi-final against Manchester United – the only time he has ever faced his new employers .
For the past 10 years, Rangnick has been best known for his work with Red Bull. In 2012 he was appointed football director of Red Bull Salzburg and RB Leipzig and was also responsible for the ambitious football development and recruitment of both clubs.
Salzburg already dominated Austria, but Sadio Mane and Kevin Kampl were among the first young talents to come to Rangnicks watch. Leipzig was meanwhile in the fourth division in Germany and was aiming for a place in the Bundesliga – a similar project, but on a larger scale than what he had previously achieved in Hoffenheim.
After three years of pulling the strings up, Rangnick took over the reins of head coach himself in 2015 and steered the club into the top division. Joshua Kimmich was one of the talents identified there who was sold to FC Bayern Munich before the promotion season.
Rangnick immediately returned to his role as director of football and continued overseeing development, talent hunting and recruitment before returning to head coach for another season in 2018, qualifying for the Champions League. Red Bull then promoted him to Head of Sports and Development and oversaw all of the company’s football activities around the world.
Development and recruitment shaped Rangnick’s decade at Red Bull. In addition to the names mentioned above, Erling Haaland, Timo Werner, Dayot Upamecano, Ibrahima Konate, Enock Mwepu and Patson Daka are just a few of those who were polished by the Red Bull system.
As a coach, Rangnick has a way of building and knitting teams, and that’s exactly what is needed now at Old Trafford. Presented with great ambitions and pressure from wealthy owners in Hoffenheim and at Red Bull, he has delivered.
Stylistically, the invention is attributed to him counterpress, which Jürgen Klopp made internationally popular at Borussia Dortmund and Liverpool over the past 10 years and which is also an integral part of many Bundesliga coaches. As such, Rangnick is considered a great influence on Klopp as well as on other leading German coaches such as Thomas Tuchel and Julian Nagelsmann.
His system, in his own words, is ‘fast, proactive, offensive, counter-pressing, exciting and entertaining’ which would be hugely popular with his new fans because it fits in with the classic ‘United Way’ of the game as played by Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson preached.
Implementing a certain style is something United is crying out for this season. Too often, the team under Solskjaer seemed tactically unprepared and incoherent and since the skills of individual players at Old Trafford are not questioned, it is now the tactics and instructions of a visionary coach like Rangnick that make the difference.
United was pulled apart by Liverpool last month because players apparently had no idea how to close their opponents as a unit, reading too many from different pages and leaving gaps to be opened at will. Under Rangnick’s direction, this scenario promises to be much more coherent and effective in the future.
But where Rangnick seems to be a good fit for United is his general approach, particularly given the expected deal that will remain with him in an advisory capacity for two more years.
He divides football into “three Cs” which are “cash, concept and competence”.
“Having some cash to spare is certainly helpful in football and in business, but that money isn’t going to help you if you don’t have the other two Cs in your portfolio,” he told ESPN.
“To be successful in the long term, you need a plan for the development of the club and the best possible and competent people to implement the concept and plan. These three C’s were the basis of ours [Red Bull’s] Sporting success pave the way for the development of players with quality and increased market value by a factor of 10 or sometimes even higher.
United are full of money, but Rangnick is now ready to add concept and expertise to the party.
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