Borussia Monchengladbach’s Rene Maric is 27 — and is the youngest and most interesting assistant coach in the Bundesliga.
A former amateur player who started coaching his local side TSU Handenberg in Austria at 17, the psychology graduate was one of the main writers for tactics blog spielverlagerung.de.
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His lengthy essays on the finer details of the modern game didn’t make for easy reading but won him many admirers in the industry. Thomas Tuchel, then at Mainz, commissioned opposition scouting reports. He was later tasked to explain the mechanics of Pep Guardiola’s and Jurgen Klopp’s pressing game to a few Premier League clubs. Work on player analysis for Brentford and Midtjylland followed.
Maric struck up a friendship with Red Bull Salzburg’s under-18 coach Marco Rose and was appointed his assistant in 2017. Together, they won the UEFA Youth League in 2018 and were promoted to take charge of the first team. Since last summer, Maric has been working under Rose at Gladbach. The Athletic met him to talk about the lastest tactical developments in the Bundesliga and the art of coaching without prior experience as a professional.
How exactly did you get the job at RB Salzburg?
I brazenly approached Marco and asked him whether we could talk about tactics and training. We met a few times for a few hours in very relaxed fashion. I didn’t see it as a job interview — I just thought it was really cool that I could chat with someone who had a lot of experience and knowledge at this level. To be the under-18s coach at a club like Salzburg, who place a lot of value on player development, is a big thing.
As it happened, his assistant coach was moving on to a different job within the club. Marco said I should present myself to Ernst Tanner, the head of the Salzburg academy. We talked about training methodology and Red Bull’s playing philosophy, which I knew well from watching them a lot when Roger Schmidt was their manager (2012-2014). I was an outsider but I had an analytic background and many of the ideas about utilising different forms of game exercises in training that I had written about in my book (Fussball durch Fussball) chimed with those Tanner had installed at the academy, even if their terminology was different. A week later, Tanner just said: “We’ll take you. Here’s your contract, here’s your starting date, here’s your salary.” And I said: “Nice”.
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What do you mean by having an “analytic background”?
My co-author Marco Henseling is an expert in learning theory. I picked up a lot of from him. And during my study of psychology, I tried to find football angles for all my seminars and papers. I wrote about football as a vehicle for the prevention of violence, for example. I started coaching in amateur football 10 years ago and writing for Spielverlagerung shortly after. Those were two different worlds. You could experiment with ideas in an extreme way in coaching, on a low competitive level. The club really helped me, I should add. The groundsman drew up extra lines to divide the pitch into zones and the boys were extremely open. On the other hand, Spielverlagerung got me consulting jobs in professional football, such as scouting, coaching coaches, mentoring, tactical presentations for Football Associations in Saudi Arabia, analysing players — I got insights into a variety of things and learned a lot across the board. That was very cool.
Let’s talk about the way that tactics are often analysed by the media. We read a lot about what one manager tried to do, how their plans did or didn’t work out… How realistic is that way of looking at it, in light of the game’s dynamic nature? You now know the view from the bench.
I’ve always said that writing about tactics shouldn’t be about “the manager’s aims and intentions were to do this” and so on. It should only ever be about what actually happened on the pitch. Remember that Mike Tyson quote: “Everyone has a plan until you get smacked in the face.”
That’s football, too. You can go out with certain ideas of how you’ll play. Then the opposition react, change the way they attack the ball or position themselves, and you have to change in response. It doesn’t always happen because of the manager, either. Sometimes, a player realises he needs to be four metres to the left to close a gap and by that simple act, he solves a problem for his team and creates a new one for the opposition. There are infinite decisions made in a game of football. It’s impossible for the coach to make this decisions for the players. We can give them a guideline or a “solution space” through principles, they have to perceive, decide and execute on the pitch.
That’s why it’s much harder to be a top player than a good coach. You have to do so many things in everyday life, work so hard to get that level, and on top of that, you get all this input, input, input (from the coach) and then on game day, things look completely different on the pitch. What makes Pep Guardiola special is the amount of (technical and tactical) content he is able to communicate to his team, enabling them to react to problems. During his Bayern days, it didn’t matter what opponents did — within a split second, they could change, adapt and find a new solution. This could be a case of someone dropping a couple of metres to be more open for a pass, for example. It’s more a question of principles rather than patterns and processes.
So there are no playbooks for specific moves, as in American football, for example?
You can show them some concrete possibilities, dependent on the opposition doing certain things. It’s an if/then decision process in some aspects. But no one says, “OK, now it’s play No 7.” It’s more about saying that specific positional and numerical situations can lead to specific things. Every time players come up with solutions that we hadn’t practised, we’re happier than they are. It’s great for a coach if the players get creative and come up with unforeseen answers within a framework. Then, we can learn from them, which is cool. In some games, the opposition do exactly what we thought they might do and our ideas work out and in others, you need your players to make the right decisions.
That all sounds very abstract?
It’s not. Take this basic situation — your team is on the ball. What’s the aim? You want to score a goal by keeping the ball and find an option to pass it, ideally forward. Different teams do it differently but the principle is the same. Your team-mates try to make themselves available. If they’re not available, you try to help them by opening up space for them. Based on these two, three basic actions, you try to come up with solutions and situations. Some teams will take a riskier approach in order to get towards the goal quicker, others want to protect the ball more. But the actions are the essentially the same and repeatable in training.
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A “principle” would be one striker coming short to receive the ball and another one making a run behind, for example?
Yes. Or someone moving inside and another player realising you need the width and taking up that position. It’s easy to remember that but much harder to get the timing exactly right in a game. That’s what you do in training. You work on communication on the team level, on decision-making and execution on the individual level.
Would you agree that Guardiola’s way of playing is the most difficult?
That depends on the coach. For Pep, it would be more difficult to play like Diego Simeone and for Simeone, it would be more difficult to play like Pep. But for teams, the trickiest thing is to be dominant in all phases of the game, which is what Pep wants his team to be. It takes a lot of effort because you have to be superb in all aspects. You have to be brilliant at switching to defence. You have to be able to play on the break and go vertical but also able to turn around at the right moment keep possession and look for spaces again. That’s a lot of demands on the players.
Is Jose Mourinho’s more passive approach still state of the art?
His Real Madrid team certainly were not passive when they set the record for goals and points (in 2012). Coming second with Manchester United (in 2016) was also a great success. He does try to adapt to his players. From what I saw at Tottenham in the first few games, they were very different from his other sides. Some of the advantages he had at the beginning, in terms of training methodology and tactical organisation, have since been widely copied. But I wouldn’t put it past him to reinvent himself.
Let me ask the same question in a different way, perhaps. Is it still possible to play successfully without a well-structured pressing game?
It’s difficult. Teams get better all the time, in all areas. The difference with football from 20, 30 years ago is immense. Players are on a very high level in terms of athleticism, tactics and decision-making. They are much more rounded, having been developed in a much more professional way from an early age. That’s why it’s difficult to play without pressing. Or without well-structured defensive processes, at a minimum. You don’t have to attack the ball high up — everyone defines pressing differently — but you have to be effective and efficient in your defensive processes. Otherwise, the kind of players you routinely come up against now will simply take you apart. We’ve come up against sides with Salzburg and with Gladbach that defend very deep but are nevertheless very active and organised in those tight spaces. They move across very well, take turns in attacking the ball and so on. It’s active defending — even it doesn’t look as such compared to sides who go for the ball much higher up the pitch.
But can you drop that deep as a top side? If you win the ball back, you have so much ground to make up?
The problem is a different one. As a top team, you can’t cede the ball to an underdog who’s happy with the game being 0-0. If you want to win against a side who’s happy not to lose, you need to get the ball. Ideally, early.
Guardiola, left, and Simeone have contrasting approaches to setting their teams up (Photo: Burak Akbulut/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)The Bundesliga has been a league built on transition in recent years. Is the trend going towards becoming more complete sides? At Leipzig, Julian Nagelsmann has been adding possession elements to their pressing game and at Gladbach, you’ve been adding pressing to the possession game.
The players are becoming more complete. Teams with those kind of players become more complete as they’re trying to maximise potential in all phases of the game. If you’re an underdog team who only muster few counter-attacks or few positional attacks, it would be stupid if you didn’t try to play them as best as possible. At the same time, top teams will have more possession but still have to practice dead balls and counter-attacks, because these situations arise. Otherwise, you drop points. And you can hardly afford to drop points anymore the ways things are going. You need to squeeze out the last few percentage points. In England, you were out of the title race if you lost two games last year. If you lose two games because you don’t play two counter-attacks well, you’d be upset. There’s definitely an effort on becoming more rounded without neglecting your core strengths.
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I once used the term “micro tactics” in relation to Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund at the height of their powers in 2012. They looked like a side who didn’t even need a big tactical idea anymore because they were collectively able to do the right thing by themselves, at the micro level if you will, at any given moment. Is that feasible? When I asked Ralf Rangnick, he thought that was impossible. He said a team always needed a very clear idea what they’re supposed to as there was no time to react well collectively otherwise.
For me, tactics is basically finding a decision, or: the sum of the decisions found by individual players. If a player sees he’s being attacked head on and can dribble past on the right, that’s tactics. That’s what we’re trying to do in training: helping players take stock of the situation and the best decision. If he sees the situation often, he can read it, like a chess player can by looking quickly at the board.
But in chess, only one piece moves at a time?
That’s right. Football is a little more dynamic but fundamentally, I don’t think that micro tactics and “big” tactics are ideas that are in opposition to each other. You need a framework for your solutions. If I tell the player we want to play vertical, he can look ahead before he receives the ball and check who’s available. You take away an array of other possible decisions at that moment, which allows him to focus and be quicker. If the idea is to go forward, the pass can be played in a way that helps the receiver gain ground or an angle to play the next ball forward. If isn’t, you will pass it differently. These are micro-tactics but they exist within a grander scheme of things. The idea is always to find a way of playing that suits your players. Once they master it, you can add extra layers. You want to convince your players of your idea until they try to find flexibility within that set-up.
Does your psychology degree help you a lot in dealing with the players?
Every staff member needs to be a psychologist of sorts. You need to know how to make players better and know how to deal with them to keep their spirits up. But I wasn’t a professional. In some areas, I lack experience. I tend to step back, listen and watch Marco handle it. I also go to older players and ask them how they feel in certain situations. “Tell me.” They’re very open. They like to talk. Then, you find that some players perceive similar situations very differently because they’re different characters or part of different generations. Some of the young players we have don’t get nervous ahead of matches at all. They’ve been used to that kind of pressure and travelling to the national teams and signing autographs and talking to the media from a really young age. It’s very different to 30 years ago, when you basically became a Bundesliga professional without even having made such experiences.
How do you win over your players, especially as a young coach? Is it the knowledge? Is it the social competence? Is it both?
You have to do it all. But the human side is the foundation. Let’s assume you have very little substance but manage to pass it on 100 per cent, then some of the basics will stick. The lads will learn to do things by themselves if you support that kind of autonomous learning as a leader. That way, you can have super substance even if not’s coming from the manager. If you have lots of substance but no one’s listening to you, no one believes in you and nothing sticks, you’ll have zero. The human dimension takes precedence over everything. Of course, it helps if there is substance to what you’re telling them, when you’re able to lift them to another level. Players want to get better, to be successful, to perhaps one day play for their dream club and or achieve something historical with their team-mates. Once the players feel you can help them, you win them over and they respect you. It’s a process of give and take. Sometimes, if I don’t have the answer, I will say so. Then I’ll go away and try to find one. I’ve been lucky to have players at Salzburg and Gladbach who are very “coachable”.
You were never a professional player. How can you teach a forward to improve his control, for example?
The players we work with already have those skills. My focus is on things like perception, decision-making: where are you going in certain situations? How do you position yourself? Even I can demonstrate that, which helps. As the game speeds up, the use of information — by looking in the correct direction at the right moment — for example, will have to be quicker too. You need to anticipate the pass well before it gets to you. You can also use video analysis or interrupt training to give useful pointers that way. There are many possibilities, even if you can’t demonstrate the latest Neymar trick in full flight (laughs).
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(Photo: Christian Verheyen/Borussia Moenchengladbach via Getty Images)
