Julian Nagelsmann has been the coach of FC Bayern Munich for more than a year, but there are still firsts for him. On Friday, for example, he sat in front of journalists for the first time in the so-called press room on Säbener Strasse. Where historical moments in the club’s history took place, such as the press conference by Uli Hoeneß and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge in 2018, Nagelsmann had only held video conferences week after week due to the pandemic.
This time he looked and grinned down at three-dimensional faces from the podium for the first time and appropriately spoke about how he prepares for such occasions. “Now I don’t always take a piece of paper in front of a PK and write down my answers and think about it: what’s the ripper of the day today? I’ll bring it up with question three.” Rather, “then something spontaneous happens. That’s not always the smartest thing, perhaps.”
The reason why Nagelsmann went into such detail had a history: Antonio Conte, coach of Tottenham Hotspur, and Joan Laporta, president of FC Barcelona, had been annoyed with him. In Conte’s case, it was about Nagelsmann calling Spurs striker Harry Kane “brilliant” and “very expensive” – and it’s not appropriate to talk about players from other clubs and their prices in the football industry; in the case of Laporta, the point was that Nagelsmann had questioned Barcelona’s high expenses, from which Bayern themselves benefited with the lucrative sale of Robert Lewandowski – that was perhaps a little less appropriate. He had already phoned Conte, “everything is fine”. And Barcelona? “Basically, I have no problem with Mr. Laporta commenting on it.”
So now begins the second season of coach Julian Nagelsmann, who has just turned 35, at FC Bayern: on a spontaneous confrontation course with two figures from top European football. It’s not an entirely incongruous feature of this summer at the German series champion.
A win against Leipzig would be “a small statement,” says Nagelsmann
When the Munich team start the competitive season this Saturday with the Supercup at DFB Cup winners RB Leipzig, they are doing so with a team that may have been strengthened in a unique way in the history of the club: In Sadio Mané and Matthijs de Ligt, two expensive professionals from top European teams came in Noussair Mazraoui and Ryan Gravenberch are two talents from Amsterdam, in Mathys Tel a 17-year-old striker from France who has been praised by the Munich team as a super talent (who cannot yet be used against Leipzig because minors are not allowed to play). And apparently the shopping list is still not finished: Konrad Laimer from Leipzig is still on it. It was still open on Friday whether he was really coming this summer.
Nagelsmann’s season opening press conference dealt with a few detailed season opening topics. The team council has been replaced after Robert Lewandowski left; how, the coach did not reveal. The execution of penalties must also be reorganized without Lewandowski. “The only requirement is that you shouldn’t fight for the ball on the pitch,” said Nagelsmann, which sounded like a ripper that he could have considered beforehand.
Nagelsmann spoke about the additions, especially about one: Mané, 30, has “the best chances right from the start” of all the newcomers. He is sure “that he will play a very good game on Saturday.” The Bayern coach finally spoke about more fundamental things. “I feel little pressure from outside, because it’s not about life and death in football. You always exaggerate it so extremely, pressure and fear of being fired. If I’m fired at some point, I’ll be fired,” he said.
And, to top it all off, he said in the direction of all TV experts: “I don’t even know what they’re all warning me about. Somehow there are probably apocalyptic features. A wild storm is brewing that I haven’t seen yet. ” The pressure from outside is “relatively irrelevant”.
One of the experts who had warned during the week was former national team captain Michael Ballack: “If you look at the commitments, it’s interesting – and Julian Nagelsmann will be judged by that – whether he can do that with the team and the quality finds the best possible system.”
The transfers? “Important for the club” and “not just for the coach
Nagelsmann has been a Bundesliga coach for more than six years, and he has been rated as one of the greatest talents in his industry for at least as long. But never before, as Ballack put it, has a squad been put together so top-class according to his ideas. And that’s why he should now please do more than an end in the Champions League quarter-finals against Villarreal.
Nagelsmann tries to put this interpretation into perspective. It always reads like this, he said on Friday, as if all the additions had only been brought in “because of me”. The transfers are “important for the club” and “not just for the coach”. But not least due to the absence of a classic center forward for the starting eleven, it is unmistakable that the squad is tailored to Nagelsmann’s not always conventional ideas of football.
The first reliable indications of what this football should look like could be in Leipzig. “A small title”, that’s what Nagelsmann called the Supercup. But it is important to “make a small statement”.