Newly-appointed Manchester United boss Ralf Rangnick says he hasn’t reached out to Jurgen Klopp and Thomas Tuchel for advice as they will be ‘busy enough’ and he’s already got experience of living in England.
Rangnick has taken over the reins at Old Trafford on an interim basis until the end of the season and spoke to the media for the first time this morning ahead of the side’s Premier League clash with Crystal Palace.
The 63-year-old, nicknamed the ‘Godfather of Gegenpressing’, stepped down from his role as Lokomotiv Moscow’s manager of sports and development and arrives in Manchester with a stellar reputation among Europe’s coaching elite.
United is undoubtedly Rangnick’s biggest job to date, though, with the German previously managing the likes of RB Leipzig, Hoffenheim, Hannover and Schalke in his homeland.
With a coaching CV spanning nearly four decades, Rangnick is viewed as a mentor to a host of the most high-profile managers working in football today, including Julian Nagelsmann, Ralph Hasenhuttl, Klopp and Tuchel.
Chelsea manager Tuchel, given his big break in coaching by Rangnick at Ulm, outlined the ‘huge influence’ his fellow countryman has had on his career just last week.
Asked whether he had managed to catch up with Tuchel, Klopp or Hassenhuttl, Rangnick told MUTV: ‘I don’t need to speak to them about life in England because I lived in England myself some 40 years ago and I’ve been here on and off so I get along well in the country.
‘Jurgen Klopp is also a German coach at Liverpool. We are all busy enough in our own jobs and there is not that much time to speak with other coaches.
‘This has always been the case also in Germany. But, of course, when we see each other and play against each other this will only be in March or April, I’m very much looking forward to seeing those three.’
Rangnick was briefly a student at the University of Sussex in the early 1980s and has great memories of his ‘wonderful year’ in Brighton while turning out for local team Southwick.
‘I think I’ve been back to Brighton once, but this at the time was one of the most memories times of my youth,’ he added.
‘I lived with a host family called Seymour in Hove, very close to the current stadium but at the time it was the old Goldstone Ground.
‘I played myself for a small club called Southwick not very far from that ground and I have very good memories of that year.
‘I lived with a family, studied as a guest student at Sussex University and twice per week I took the fast train from Brighton to Victoria station, watching football games, going to the theatre.
‘It was a wonderful year that I enjoyed very much.’
English football clearly left its mark and helped ‘develop’ Rangnick in the early days of his career both as a player and coach.
‘Having the background of the culture and the English language, I’ve always been interested in the football,’ he went on.
‘Since that year in the early 1980s I’ve been infected in a positive way by the way that football is being played, the atmosphere in the stadiums. I very much enjoyed that.
‘In that year when I was with Southwick I also had the experience of how much the players would encourage themselves on the pitch so I became a different kind of player and, later on, a different kind of coach by encouraging players in training sessions and in the game.
‘This is something that’s not so usual in Germany and it helped me a lot to develop myself as a player at the time and as a coach.’
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