Oliver Glasner: I am impatient and not perfect... but you always get 100 per cent with me

When Oliver Glasner arrived with his Eintracht Frankfurt team at the Nou Camp on April 14, 2022, Barcelona were undefeated in 15 games, including a 4-0 win over Real Madrid at the Santiago Bernabéu, and yet the man now in charge of Crystal Palace says he felt optimistic.

He recalls turning to his assistant, and friend, Michael Angerschmid, whom he had known since the age of 18 when they both signed professional contracts at SV Ried, a small Austrian Bundesliga club. “I said, ‘Hey, Mickey, five years ago we managed LASK [Linz] in the second division in Austria in front of 400 people. Now we are driving into the Nou Camp.”

Glasner pauses and recounts the moment. “And then I said, ‘I really believe we will win this game’.”

That night, Glasner put himself on the European football map. His side won 3-2 in the Europa League quarter-final second leg, and 4-3 on aggregate. There were an estimated 30,000 Eintracht fans in the stadium and another 30,000 on the streets of Barcelona. The following month, Eintracht beat Rangers in the final to win their first European trophy in 41 years.

Less than two years later, Glasner, 50, did something similar in Palace’s late-season relegation battle. He ended the season with six wins in seven games, beating Liverpool at Anfield and demolishing Manchester United and Aston Villa at home. In his office at Palace’s training ground over a long chat, one can see where that powerful sense of belief comes from. This is a man who loves his job, and is determined to do it his way.

He tells a story about being picked, as a teenager, to represent Austria Under-15s. At the time he was playing men’s football, but for his village side Riedau, a dot on the map west of Linz. “The manager said, ‘Oliver, you have to go to a bigger club. I can’t invite you when you’re playing for a small village.’ I said, ‘OK, then don’t invite me’.”

That was his last cap for Austria, at any level, he recalls with a chuckle. But he stands by his decision. He played more than 500 games at centre-half for SV Ried up to a week before his 37th birthday, when a brain haemorrhage ended his career. His coaching career has been meteoric. He left Ried after a season to manage LASK Linz, a local big name fallen on hard times. Success there took him to Wolfsburg, Eintracht and now the Premier League. Each time there has been progress, and all three clubs were propelled into the Champions League places.

He says he likes a challenge – a chance to make a difference at a club – and after a handful of Premier League offers, he alighted on Palace. A challenge was certainly what he got. Just the second Austrian manager in Premier League history, he arrived amid a crisis in February when Roy Hodgson could no longer carry on. After Premier League survival, the summer window threatened to herald the exit of the brightest young talents in one of the more exciting squads outside the Premier League big six.

How do you convince players to stay at a club like Palace? “Anyone has to identify with what they are doing,” Glasner says. “You have to identify with your employee. If a player believes it is the wrong club then we have to show him it is the best club at that stage of his career. And if it is not, like Michael [Olise] then we have to be honest. The chairman [Steve Parish] also said that – it is great to sell one to Bayern Munich. They want to win the Champions League. We can’t tell Michael, ‘OK, we’ll win the Champions League’. He has the opportunity. Congratulations. Win-win situation.”

‘It is my job to find the position for a player to show his strengths’

Palace did, however, retain Eberechi Eze and Marc Guehi, the latter subject to a prolonged courtship from Newcastle United. Glasner’s ethos is one of guidance, teaching and convincing his players what to do rather than telling them. Over the course of our conversation, he often refers to his life as a parent of three children. As per the parenting challenge, he wants his players to make good decisions – and will accept mistakes – as part of the learning process.

“We all want to do what we can do well,” he says. “It is my job to find the position for a player to show his strengths. There we can see the best Eze, the best Marc Guehi, the best Adam Wharton, the best Tyrick Mitchell and all the others. This is what we show them. If we are convinced it doesn’t fit, we will find a solution. If we feel it fits how we play with all your strengths and qualities – we also accept your weaknesses.”

He alights upon a phrase for the things in his job he loves the most: “emotional salary”. “You can’t buy the relationships with the players. Or the feeling after winning at Anfield. Or the feeling after winning a trophy. You can have billions of pounds but this – this emotional salary – you have to deserve. This is the best feeling you can have in football. When you treat each other with appreciation and respect and trust. We are not just throwing hearts around. Sometimes it’s tough for the players.”

‘I appreciate going to Selhurst – I never want to see that as normal’

Glasner grew up in a family almost exclusively of women. He did not know his father until his twenties and Glasner is his mother Sieglinde’s surname. Sieglinde raised him with the help of her own widowed mother. Sieglinde’s sister was also a single mother with a daughter born within four months of Glasner, and the cousins grew up as close as siblings. The only male in his life was his grandmother’s partner, who arrived later.

They were an unusually liberal family for the time, he says, and they allowed Glasner to make independent decisions about his life and his education. Both his grandmother and Sieglinde had lives shaped by the deprivation of post-war Austria. Riedau was in the US Allied occupation zone and his grandmother, in classic post-war style, first tasted chewing gum when a GI handed her a stick of it.

“My mother was born in 1948,” he says. “There were eight years of school and then just work. She had no [further] education. She worked as a waitress … we didn’t have money, or a lot of money, but I could do everything I wanted to do.” He recalls Sieglinde spending a third of her salary one month to ensure he went on the school skiing trip. He treasured the new football boots that arrived every Easter. What that childhood gave him, he says, was an immense joy at the possibilities of life.

“I always appreciate every time I go to Selhurst [Park] and I hear the fans singing. I never want to see that as normal. It is something great. I never want to forget – and I say this to the players – we all live our childhood dreams. Every single one of us. If someone had told me, when I was six years old, kicking a ball against the tower block where I lived, that I would play more than 400 games in the Austrian Bundesliga; that I would manage in the German Bundesliga and the Premier League; I would have said, ‘Hey, this is all my dreams’. What I also say to the players is that none of us, at six years old, would have asked: ‘What about money?’ It is never about money.”

He acknowledges saying that is a privilege in itself. Even so, he says building that connection with his players has been crucial to his success. It is not always easy. This Friday will be the first time that the whole squad has been together in the 10 weeks since they reconvened. There are new signings, varying pre-season availability and even now, ahead of the Leicester City home game, there are injuries.

At Eintracht there were tough times. Glasner had a difference of opinion with sporting director Markus Krösche and Glasner’s departure in May 2023 was agreed before the side played their last game of the season, a defeat in the DFB-Pokal final. “My impatience is sometimes one of my biggest strengths and sometimes one of my biggest weaknesses,” Glasner says. “But you always get me 100 per cent.

“Don’t expect a perfect man. I don’t want to be perfect. Although I do always wish to see the perfect game and I never have. Sometimes I am impatient and it’s tough for the staff and the players because I always want to improve and keep the wheel running. I don’t know why – that’s me. I don’t like it when someone says, ‘This worked the last 10 years’. Yes, keep the good things but there is always adjustment. And not standing still. This is how the world works.”

He is worried that the game is producing too few players who question their managers. As a 17-year-old, he says he refused the first offer from SV Ried to join their first team because he had school on Saturday mornings and he wanted to complete his exams. He reasoned SV Ried would return for him the next year and he was right. He likes players to ask him why. He wants to convince them rather than tell them.

“If I said to a 17-year-old from the academy, ‘Do a 30-minute handstand – it’s good for you’ – he will. I [as a teenager] would have asked why. I would like it if somebody asked me now. I expect them to. It’s OK to ask, ‘Why do you want me to do this?’ I don’t want the players to do things because we tell them to. They should do it because they see the benefit. It is not like we are in the army. We have to convince them.”

We go back to that 4-0 win over United at the start of May and Glasner sees parallels with the night in the Nou Camp two years earlier. Then, as with Barcelona, there was no guarantee of a result but he felt that he had the players and the supporters at a point where they believed themselves and the club capable.

“Everyone who came to the game [against United] said, ‘Ah, today it’s Manchester United – we can win’. This was a self-fulfilling prophecy, and then it happens. Why? I don’t know. That’s why I don’t always want to worry and live in fear. If you fear falling then you will. When we won the Europa League we were not better than Barcelona – but we had such belief.

“Every single one of us believed we could win the game. And then it happened. This is the biggest success you can have, not just in football. If you believe in yourself, it doesn’t mean you will do it. You can lose a game. But when we go on to the pitch, I want us to say, ‘We are here to win the game’. It is how I want to live my life. Because life is so much better that way. It is all about having a good life. It is not about being able to afford everything I want. A good life is having a good feeling, seeing your children growing up. This is living.”