Julian Nagelsmann: Hoffenheim's young coach takes on Manchester City

It was short and sweet; a friendly handshake, a firm pat on the back before Julian Nagelsmann and Ralf Rangnick ran to their respective dugouts. The former was at pains to play down the intrigue surrounding Saturday’s meeting between his current team, Hoffenheim, and his employer-in-waiting, RB Leipzig, where Rangnick is holding the fort in a sporting director-slash-manager role. “It interests me zilch, who is on the other side,” Nagelsmann said. But it was, as SportBild described it, “a duel against the future” – one Rangnick won.

From next summer they will work in tandem at Leipzig, who activated a €10m release clause in Nagelsmann’s contract in June and agreed a four-year deal, having been beaten 5-2 and 4-0 by Hoffenheim last season. Rangnick will return to a supervisory position to oversee a project with the long-term aim of establishing Leipzig at Europe’s top table.

It is an unusual predicament – Hoffenheim have hardly flourished since the announcement, winning two league games – and the clarity Nagelsmann called for has not wiped away all blurred lines. In some ways, it remains the elephant in the room. The buildup to Leipzig’s 2-1 win in Sinsheim, the town in Baden-Württemberg where Hoffenheim are based, inevitably raised more questions than answers, including communication lines between Nagelsmann and Oliver Mintzlaff, the Leipzig chief executive, who said they had exchanged only the odd text since the move was announced.

“It seems unrealistic the new coach would not bother with his future employer,” he said. Nagelsmann, determined to unravel the pre-match narrative, insisted Rangnick would not be his “boss” at Leipzig, stating that Mintzlaff holds that role. Rangnick disagreed but said: “I am convinced that we will work well together.”

As for Leipzig, qualifying for the Europa League meant starting this season in July, but they are beginning to show their true colours and have won three of their past five games. “We did not worry about who’s going to coach us next year,” said the captain, Kevin Kampl. On Rangnick’s watch, Leipzig lured Naby Keïta, Emil Forsberg and Timo Werner, who has outlined his desire to play for Nagelsmann next season.

Nagelsmann is a Rangnick disciple, having joined Hoffenheim as the under-17s assistant while the former was head coach in 2010, and that should smooth the transition. In the meantime Mintzlaff is content to have Rangnick in charge. He said: “The team has stepped things up now after a rough start and the coaching staff have a better understanding of the squad. We’re starting to play the sort of football that we want to once more. With his experience and knowhow, he is the ideal coach for us this season.”

Next season, it will be Nagelsmann’s turn. It is a match made in heaven: the Bundesliga’s youngest club – Leipzig were founded nine years ago – recruiting the league’s youngest coach. With Nagelsmann having helped Hoffenheim punch above their weight, there is a sense of excitement at what he may be able to coax out of a more talented squad. At 31, he has already overseen a century of Hoffenheim matches, the next of which is arguably the biggest in the club’s history: at home to Manchester City in the Champions League on Tuesday.

Nagelsmann, who retired at 20 owing to knee injuries, is younger than a trio of Pep Guardiola’s players: Fernandinho, David Silva and Vincent Kompany. City’s manager and Thomas Tuchel, who first employed Nagelsmann as an opposition scout at Augsburg, are among those to have given approval to the methods used by Nagelsmann, who received a phone call from Real Madrid this summer, with regard to replacing Zinedine Zidane, but was reluctant to move his young family away from Germany.

Hoffenheim, a village near Heidelberg with a population of around 3,270, are no ordinary opponents – these are their first steps in Europe’s elite competition after a third-place finish – and nor is Nagelsmann a run-of-the-mill manager. He became the first coach to sign up to the Common Goal initiative last year and is a relentless taskmaster, who counts Guardiola among his role models. Nagelsmann, too, enjoys nurturing young players and has taken 18-year-old Reiss Nelson on loan from Arsenal. At the training ground, a 6 metre x 3 metre video screen allows the coach to provide his players with live feedback, to analyse opponents – or play Fifa 19. “Julian has a kind of healthy impatience; always wanting to compete, always wanting to win, always wanting to improve,” the midfielder Kerem Demirbay said.

As Nagelsmann has remarked, the logical progression for Hoffenheim would be to go one better domestically, to target second. “The Bundesliga is about results but I love to get those results with a certain style,” he said. “We try to give the fans their money’s worth, at home and away.”

For a team who, at the start of the millennium, played in Germany’s fifth tier, the Champions League is thrilling territory. They drew 2-2 at Shakhtar Donetsk in their Group F opener but Nagelsmann, who recently admitted to watching Manchester City’s documentary All or Nothing, knows the size of the task: “We are underdogs in the Champions League, in general, but anything is possible.” Hoffenheim defender Havard Nordveit, once of West Ham, said: “They are not unbeatable. We go into the game with no pressure.”