It’s become commonly accepted that the best coaches in soccer often don’t have the greatest playing careers. Elite managers like Jürgen Klopp and Thomas Tuchel both had underwhelming professional careers in Germany, while others like Pep Guardiola and Antonio Conte played at the highest level, but were certainly not at the top of their professions like they are now.
Some coaches come from less conventional paths, José Mourinho was famously a translator at Barcelona, and English coach Graham Potter coached at fourth division Östersund in Sweden before his path to Premier League management. But one of Europe’s brightest managerial prospects comes from a background so unique he didn’t even play youth football, instead attracting the attention of Thomas Tuchel while writing a tactics blog.
32-year-old Rene Maric’s claim to fame is unlike any other coach working in football. In 2011, Maric started writing for a soccer tactics blog called Spielverlagerung alongside working as a youth coach at TSU Handenberg, at just 17 years old. The Austrian’s writing was no ordinary sports journalism, Maric’s articles on breaking down low-blocks using positional play and others would attract the attention of big-time German media outlets and amassed a cult following online.
Eventually, Maric’s impressive writing would garner the attention of Mainz manager Thomas Tuchel. “We met, I think, 12 years ago, for the first time,” Maric said to Training Ground Guru. “He had read analysis from a Mainz game against Bayern on our blog. He seemed to like it, find it interesting, and think that it was pretty accurate; that’s what he said. Then his staff reached out to us by email, invited us in, and when we met, he was also sitting at the table.”
The meeting with the eventual Champions League winner Tuchel would result in a consultancy with Mainz, the first of many across European clubs for Maric, and his professional soccer career had officially begun.
Rene Maric kickstarted his coaching career as a blogger
It’s easy to see why the highest-level European minds would be impressed by the writer, Maric’s writing was a pioneer behind bringing in-depth tactical analysis to the average fan, introducing soccer terms like ‘half-spaces’ and ‘press-resistance’ which are now commonly understood by fans and necessary for interpreting professional soccer. In addition, Maric would make a tactical suggestion on Twitter that wouldn’t become a trend in football for many years.
If I was Löw, I wouldn't let Lahm drop back between the CB's, but let Neuer advance between them and become a playmaker in 1st third.
— René Marić (@ReneMaric) June 30, 2014
Back during the 2014 World Cup when this was tweeted, the modern ‘Sweeper Keeper’ wasn’t a part of the soccer lexicon, goalkeepers were instead limited simply to shot stopping. However, playing out from the back has become a crucial part of being a goalkeeper, and moving up alongside the center backs is now a growing part of soccer tactics, as suggested by Maric in 2014.
Next up for Maric was making the jump to professional coaching. His connection to Salzburg dates back to an old thesis paper he wrote while receiving his Master's in Psychology on how soccer can help counteract bullying in youth training. Then his return to Salzburg was through reaching out to one of Europe’s most promising coaches. In a similar fashion to his introduction to Tuchel, Maric would write an article on Red Bull Salzburg and send it to youth team manager Marco Rose.
“As it happened, his assistant coach was moving on to a different job within the club,” Maric would tell The Athletic. “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. I was an outsider but I had an analytic background and many of the ideas about utilizing different forms of game exercises in training that I had written about in my book chimed with those Tanner had installed at the academy, even if their terminology was different.”
Maric would be offered the role of assistant coach for Rose’s youth team. His response was simply, “Nice”.
Despite ruthlessly networking from the ground up, Maric was just a calm, soft spoken character. Speaking to The Athletic, Patrick Eibenberger, the fitness coach at RB Leipzig would talk about his football-obsessed friend. “There are two sides to him,” said Eibenberger. The first is that he’s likeable. The second is that he’s able to connect."
“He looks at football as a historical episode,” Eibenberger said. “He seems to know everything. I mean, everything is too drastic a way of putting it, but he knows so much. He goes back into the 30s’ and to Croatian football from the 1940s. Also Hungarian football from a long time ago. He told me once that he’d spent a long time watching Chilean football, to which I asked ‘why? How do you come up with that fetish? Who is watching loads of football in Chile?’. But he found it interesting. (Marcelo) Bielsa was playing this system and he wanted to see how it worked. He’s not mainstream in his way of thinking, that’s why it’s so good to talk to him.”
Eibenberger was not surprised in the slightest to see Maric climb up the soccer ladder, his success would continue in Austria where he and Rose would immediately win the youth league. Maric would then follow Rose to the first team of Salzburg, winning many league titles and reaching the Europa League semifinals, all the while coaching some of Europe’s brightest prospects like Erling Haaland and Dominik Szoboszlai.
As the duo continued to win trophies, Rose would attract attention from Europe’s biggest teams, he would make the jump to the Bundesliga to coach Borussia Monchengladbach and then Borussia Dortmund, where Maric would follow him as his assistant.
A very good indicator of a future coach’s potential is not only his experience, but his variety of education. Leverkusen’s young Xabi Alonso, one of Europe’s best coaches, is lauded for playing under the likes of Pep Guardiola, José Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti, and Rafa Benitez, all very different types of managers. Maric has this attribute on a grander scale.
His first job in professional coaching was immediately under the powerhouse that is Red Bull, soccer's first multi-club conglomerate.
"It’s a general point in life: if you have a principle, then your process can follow easier. If you have a reference, then you have something that is a target to strive for, a goal to achieve, and I think that makes you clear about which intention you should have,” said Maric. “That helps you to have the right behaviors and, in the end, it’s identity, it’s culture. That identity and culture that helps you align all the processes in a club. The Red Bull style is to attack at all times: to be on the front foot, pressing very early, trying to progress play with the ball very quickly, being very high up the pitch.
“Obviously, a lot of teams try to press. I think what Red Bull does a bit stronger and more than others is how they do it together, how extreme they do it, how they try to create an overload on the ball not just around the ball, but literally on the ball, to create a two against one situation for the ball carrier to win the ball.”
“There were teams that pressed very high, very well in the history of the game. You can mention Sacchi’s Milan, (Valeriy) Lobanovskyi (with Dynamo Kyiv), who maybe did it a bit deeper, but very co-ordinated, the Netherlands and Ajax under (Rinus) Michels.”
“The way Red Bull do it is a bit more extreme, more structured. That’s what makes them unique, and that’s probably how I describe them, this type of extreme you press, putting pressure on early, how many players they use, how focused they are on that phase of play.” (The Training Ground)
Maric would then go to a vastly different club in Monchengladbach. “Gladbach is a club that I really like and the people there stay in my heart. We adapted to Gladbach and to their culture. We tried to mix some of these things, thinking of what is non-negotiable for top-level with the stuff that you could say is like the heritage of Gladbach as a club, with Jupp Heynckes in the far past and Lucien Favre in the near past.”
Following this, Rose and Maric would join the club with one of the world’s biggest fanbases in Borussia Dortmund. “The main reason they (Dortmund) are able to get the top talents is because it’s a big club with a big fan base,” Says Maric. “It’s very attractive for the top talents. If you have that mixture of being a big club and still being able to give consistent minutes and promise he’ll be able to play, I think that just convinces these top talents to go there.” (The Training Ground)
After Rose’s dismissal at Dortmund, Maric would venture to England to become assistant coach at Leeds under American manager Jesse Marsch, another Red Bull graduate like Maric himself. Marsch's spell was unfortunately short lived and left Maric with a lot of reflecting to do.
“Having a young squad, the idea was to have a coach who had a track record of developing talent. In the end, in terms of why it didn’t work out, it’s not easy to say,” said Maric. “There are things that you can say, like the expected goals numbers were better than the rest showed. In terms of the absolute amount of running and sprinting, we were still top three in the league. But it didn’t work out. I can just talk about myself, and I’m quite honest. There are things that, in retrospect, I would like to have done better. In that period, there was also some turmoil in terms of the high-ups; it’s just normal if you’re selling a club, if you’re in the process, every decision has an additional point of discussion. Do you want to do it now? Do you do it later? And then things can get slower. That’s normal. That’s part of the situation and not necessarily the people.”
“The football culture is amazing there (in England). I think it’s very important and very helpful that I’ve learned some things when I was there. Because I think if you come to a club, country, whatever, you have to adapt to it. You have to understand the culture, you have to adapt to it.” (The Training Ground).
Perhaps, after a few unsuccessful stints as an assistant manager, it was time for a different role for the still-promising coach. In came his boyhood club, Bayern Munich, offering a role designed specifically for him. “The role here is basically trying to develop the methodology, so coach development. In German, they call it team lead, but I would probably translate it to Head of Coaching Methodology.”
“What I’m doing currently is going through the best games of Bayern Munich historically and trying to find some things that are connecting all these different players and teams and coaches through all these years and creating some things that you could call non-negotiables in terms of our playing idea.”
“And maybe also find these things we do not want to have. The role hasn’t existed before. I do believe and hope it will exist after me and they will continue it. I think it’s generally a good role because the coaches can connect with someone, they can share experiences, there’s a person who can collect all the knowledge and the content that’s going in and out of the club that can create some basic playing idea mythology as a reference.” (The Training Ground)
Maric has continuously talked about ‘identity’, ‘styles’, and even ‘heritage’ as it pertains to tactics in football. Based on his experience and formal education going through the very rigid but powerful Red Bull unit, one would assume that Maric himself would have a rather strict sports ideology. Instead, his footballing philosophy aligns more with who he is as a person rather than his professional upbringing.
He stresses that ‘tactics’ aren’t just a list of instructions given out from a coach for players to memorize and robotically carry out. Rather, they’re guiding tools used to help get the best out of the players. “For me, tactics is basically finding a decision, or: the sum of the decisions found by individual players,” Maric told The Athletic. “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.”
He dismisses the notion that he, like others from the Red Bull group, are ‘laptop managers’, a term usually given to tactics and analytics-obsessed people who are seen as out of touch with the human element of the game. “Players being able to coach themselves and their teammates makes it more likely that they'll find the proper solutions on the pitch, Maric told SPOX, “Intervening from the touchline isn't always easy: you never see the problems quite as clearly as the players who are experiencing them on the pitch. Mike Tyson once said that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And sometimes, figuratively, you get punched in the mouth during a game, too. Therefore, the more players are able to find good solutions, the better the situations are that they'll be able to put their teammates in. Too much coaching instruction can compromise that ability in players.”
Over-coaching is slowly becoming a talking point in elite football. How managers with an extensive game plan can take away some individual elements from a player's game, thus removing individual expression from football and making the experience for the fans worse. Maric, despite the tactical analysis background, is not following this trend. Instead, he sees tactics as offering solutions to players and giving them both options in a soccer sense and comfort on a personal level. This will make it easier for a young manager with no reputation in the game like Maric to enter the managerial realm, avoiding trying to overexert himself on the players.
“If the drill already limits the players' possible actions, the manager should not add to that. It shouldn't become too much," Maric said to The Athletic. “If I introduce a lot of rules into a drill and then follow those up with a lot of coaching, that is often counterproductive.”
Despite going through a ringer of global soccer powerhouses, Maric’s coaching philosophy still remains rooted in the human element. Despite forcing his way through to the top level, the Austrian has evaded picking up any of the cut-throat, corporate traits that seemingly don’t work in professional sports in these times. Instead, it's the football-loving side of Rene whose Croatian parents were forced to leave their homes when war broke out, that is climbing the soccer ladder. And his versatile education, friendly and honest personality, and willingness to work tirelessly at his craft both in football and journalism is what will bring Rene Maric to the top of the soccer coaching world in the years to come.