Ralf Rangnick’s remarkable journey from Man Utd mess to hero of Austria

November 20, 2022. Austria had just beaten the European champions Italy at the Ernst-Happel Stadium, less than seven months into Ralf Rangnick’s reign, and their German coach and his jubilant players and staff were in full voice on the bus on the way back to the team hotel. Rainhard Fendrich’s “I am from Austria”, the country’s unofficial national anthem, was belted out, as was anything by the much loved Austrian pop and schlager singer DJ Otzi. This was one party no one wanted to end and so Rangnick, sensing as much as the hotel loomed into view, made a beeline for the driver and instructed him to circle Vienna for another 45 minutes.

The mood was no less buoyant last week when the squad, having pitched up at Schlachtensee lake on the edge of the Grunewald forest close to their Euro 2024 training base in west Berlin for a spot of stretching, decided there were better ways to spend a beautiful morning. Next thing a couple dozen players and attendant staff were in the water playing head tennis as amused locals watched on.

All of which should give you some sense of what Turkey, even with their huge following here in Germany, will be up against in Leipzig in the last 16 on Tuesday. Austria’s fast, vertical, attacking football enjoyed quite the showcase in their thrilling 3-2 win over Netherlands, a victory that was enough to see them beat pre-tournament favourites France to top spot in Group D and secure a place in the more favourable half of the knockout stage draw.

But it is the special bond between the players, encouraged and nurtured at every turn by Rangnick, that may yet prove to be Austria’s superpower at Euro 2024 and is perhaps best encapsulated by the presence in Germany of David Alaba.

Austria’s captain suffered an anterior cruciate ligament playing for Real Madrid in December that ruled him out of the tournament. He could quite easily have elected to spend these weeks on holiday or recuperating back home. But Alaba is here, ensconced in the group, a shoulder to lean on, a voice of authority and respect; above all, an inspirational team-mate and galvanising presence.

It is the sort of teamsmanship that could not contrast more starkly to the divisions and selfishness that Rangnick encountered during an ill-fated spell as Manchester United’s interim manager when, at its lowest point, he would witness some players who were fit dropping out of games because of a perceived slight or general reluctance.

Those six months at Old Trafford were among the most frustrating and depressing of a storied 41-year career in which he has veered between coach, sporting director and builder of clubs and back again. But the rebound from such disappointment, and the occasional ridicule that came his way, has been quite remarkable.

It was not on a whim, for example, that Bayern Munich pushed so hard to appoint him as their manager in the weeks leading up to the Euros, desperate for someone to restore unity in a dressing room that had been at war with one too many managers for too long.

In that sense, it was fitting, as Rangnick deliberated for 10 days over what was sold as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”, that he should receive heartfelt messages during that time from senior Austria players imploring him over WhatsApp to stay. Some of those same players were even asked for references about Rangnick by Bayern and found themselves in a rather awkward, conflicted position, eager on the one hand to sing their manager’s praises and, yet, at the same time, wanting to hold back, reluctant to lose him.

Sitting around a table in the quiet clubhouse at FC Viktoria Backnang, Görge Kalb, Thomas Freudensprung and Erwin Weitbrecht know exactly how those Austria players feel right now.

“Ralf could have called us all up at two o’clock in the morning and we’d have all been there on the training ground 10 minutes later for him,” Freudensprung says, proudly. “He created an incredible team spirit.”

“It was obvious to everyone he was going to be a big coach,” Kalb points out, to immediate nods of agreement. “He improved everybody,” Weitbrecht adds. “Everybody.”

Long before Austria and the call from Bayern, long before United or RB Leipzig, his career masterpiece, and that German Cup with Schalke, or the successes with Ulm 1846 and Hoffenheim and all the rest, there was Viktoria Backnang. That was where it all started for Rangnick, in Germany’s sixth tier as the 25-year-old player-manager of his hometown club, half an hour’s drive north east of Stuttgart.

It is a beautiful, sunny afternoon when Telegraph Sport visits and it is easy to see why Rangnick’s parents settled here after originally meeting in Saxony at the end of the Second World War. Rangnick’s father, Dietrich, was born in what now constitutes Kaliningrad in Russia and his mother, Erika, hailed from Breslau — now Wroclaw — in Poland. With its stunning half-timbered houses, enchanting little streets and unhurried charm, Backnang has more of the feel of a sleepy, idyllic village than a town. There is no evidence of a country staging a major tournament or the noisy waves of Euro fever sweeping Germany’s big cities. The Stiftskirche, formerly the church of Backnang Abbey, dates back to the 12th century and lends an added if understated magnificence to this most picturesque of settings. Wander up Uhlandstrasse and at its centre is the delightful ice cream parlour, Dolomiti, where Rangnick would hang out with friends as a young boy, when he was not playing football.

Back at “Vereinshaus FC Viktoria”, Kalb, Freudensprung and Weitbrecht are eagerly reliving the two, unforgettable seasons when this little known semi-professional side reached Germany’s fourth tier thanks to successive promotions masterminded by an innovative young coach with grand ideas and even grander ambitions. In frames on the walls are pictures of Backnang’s squad from those triumphant 1983-84 and 1984-85 campaigns.

Rangnick sits unobtrusively at the end of a row, near the back, on both pictures but everyone knew who was in charge. In this age of extreme analysis and marginal gains, Rangnick’s methods are commonplace now but they were revolutionary at the time.

Freudensprung recalls opponents who had just been soundly beaten asking the Viktoria players what they were doing as Rangnick sent them out for post-match “warm downs”. He would attach tape strappings to players’ legs, recruited a medical assistant and roped in an Olympic physiotherapist to assist with injuries. With the help of his father, a newspaper layout editor, Rangnick produced Backnang’s first match-day programme, FC Aktuell. Training quickly became three nights a week, not two. Sometimes they would train with tennis balls to improve their touch.

Players would have a ball and each get fined one Deutsche Mark if it was not pumped up properly. Smoking, widespread at the time, was banned within a couple of hours of a match and no one was allowed to puff on a cigarette while wearing the team tracksuits, which he had created especially to make them look and feel more like a team. That said, star striker and committed smoker, Joachim Titz, could not help but take the odd liberty. The dressing room became self-policing. “Ralf was always two or three steps ahead,” said Freudensprung, now 64 and on the verge of retirement as a logistics manager.

Some things proved a harder sell, at least initially. Rangnick wanted all his squad on electrolyte-infused drinks after a game, rather than what had been the customary post-match diet of beer. “That was a problem”, said Kalb, a smile developing. “We’d been a very thirsty team!”

He would relent to an extent by allowing them the odd beer after a win, albeit not before a healthy consumption of electrolytes, and enjoyed celebrating with them. This was the point about Rangnick: he pulled everyone together, there were no outsiders. Just like Austria now.

Not everything ran like clockwork, though. Kalb takes up the story. “When we played away we travelled by car to the matches and Ralf would usually lead the convoy,” he recounts. “So we’d be at the traffic lights and Ralf wasn’t moving. All the cars behind him were wondering what was going on and they’d be beeping their horns.” Rangnick, it turned out, was colour blind and struggled to distinguish between red and green. “To be honest, that was about the biggest problem we’d face on a Sunday match day!” Kalb, now 62, chuckled.

Peeling the obsessive Rangnick away from his work was not easy. Uli Ferber, another former Backnang player, friend of Rangnick and now a powerful agent whose clients have included the former Germany striker Mario Gómez and Alexander Hleb, once of Arsenal, recalls a plan he and a couple of team-mates once hatched. “We’d often go to the Beer Academy in Backnang, which was owned by a Greek landlord at the time, and Ralf didn’t want to go,” Ferber recalls. “So we thought about how we could get him out and ended up telling him we had something urgent about football to discuss that absolutely couldn’t wait. He dropped everything and was at the Beer Academy at 7pm sharp. We’d tell him, ‘Wait for another beer, then we’ll talk’. By 1am, each of us having all drunk a lot, he’d realised there was nothing to discuss and we’d just wanted to have fun with him.”

One article in the local paper, the Backnanger Kreiszeitung, from back then carried a quote from Rangnick in its headline: “Trust is the balance for success”. It has been a mantra throughout his career, and probably explains in part why he found it so tough at United. The way some in the dressing room sought to undermine United’s captain Harry Maguire, for example, went against everything Rangnick believed in. The culture was rotten but Rangnick found himself rendered largely impotent by his interim status and the intransigence upstairs. It did not help that he was unable to bring his most trusted assistants with him to Old Trafford, not least Lars Kornetka who is his right hand man with Austria, and that Michael Carrick and Kieran McKenna departed as coaches soon after his arrival. Yet this was not a club in need of a quick fix but one, as he so memorably put it, requiring the equivalent of open heart surgery.

It is probably no coincidence that Rangnick’s biggest successes have predominantly been with young, hungry squads he has been able to shape and mould in his way of thinking and playing. At Backnang, he was pushing at an open door. The same at Hoffenheim. Leipzig, too of course, and it is instructive that so many of Austria’s key players — from Konrad Laimer and Nicolas Seiwald to Marcel Sabitzer and Christoph Baumgartner — played for one or both of RB Leipzig and Red Bull Salzburg and are well-versed in the systems Rangnick, the godfather of gegenpressing, has long championed.

Looking out across the Karl Euerle Sportanlage, scene of many of a victory under Rangnick, Kalb — a giant in both personality and stature — holds a pretend microphone to his mouth and reimagines a move from a game. Freudensprung, who had known Rangnick since their school days together, remembers football dominating their lives. “He was above average as a student but we didn’t learn!” he joked. “The priority was to play football.” Weitbrecht recalls opponents being confounded by Rangnick’s high-pressing approach and “hinterlaufen football”, where coordinated runs in behind from deep created endless overloads. To that end, Rangnick owes much to a chance friendly against Valeriy Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv at Backnang’s winter training camp at Sportschule Ruit in February 1985.

The Ukrainian side, which boasted the great Oleg Blokhin and whose revered coach would lead the Soviet Union to the final of Euro 88, played a sophisticated zonal marking and pressing system. Backnang crashed to a 7-2 defeat, overwhelmed by a system that left Rangnick’s side routinely outnumbered. Rangnick was captivated by what he saw. It sowed a seed.

Freudensprung recalls the Backnang players had no time to get nervous before the game because they were too busy clearing the snow and ice off the pitch to get the game on. Kalb injured himself in the process and had to sit out the match, to his immense frustration. “If he’d played then we’d have won!” Freudensprung interjected to howls of laughter. “Blokin would not have seen the ball!”

It is little wonder the Backnang players were so sad when Rangnick left that summer to take over VfB Stuttgart’s second team. His replacement, Roland Stampfl, lasted about 10 weeks into the new season and his replacement, Bernd Wörner, not much longer. Kalb and Freudensprung eventually took over the running of the team and at least ensured a respectable end to a troubled campaign but were powerless to prevent relegation. Viktora’s website describe Rangkick’s exit as having “dramatic consequences” that left the team “hopelessly lagging behind the competition”.

“Ralf can be extremely inspiring,” Ferber says. “He ignites the fire in you.” Austria’s players would testify to that. At the start of Euro qualifying, Rangnick handed each member of his squad a carabiner — a symbol of the climb they had to make together. But he also wanted them to be in possession of something that would remind them of the national team on a daily basis and that they could use as a key chain. Many of the players arrived in Germany for the tournament with the carabiners attached to their backpacks.

What a climb it is proving so far.