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      Bruno Fernandes, Manchester United and the Long Game

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      Credit…Pool photo by Peter PowellOn SoccerBruno Fernandes and the Long GameThe Portuguese midfielder’s circuitous path to Manchester United stardom revealed inefficiencies in soccer’s vast scouting system, and how even a sure thing can almost slip through the cracks.Credit…Pool photo by Peter PowellSupported byContinue reading the main storyJan. 14, 2021MANCHESTER, England — What strikes Martelinho, whenever he watches Bruno Fernandes play, is how little he has changed. Fernandes might now be the best player on the in-form team in the world’s biggest league, but to Martelinho, he is not recognizably different from the teenager he coached in the youth teams of a struggling Portuguese club a decade ago.“The way he is now is the way he always was,” Martelinho said, casting his mind back to the two years he spent working with Fernandes in the academy at Boavista. “He always played with a lot of ambition, always on the front foot, never playing a pass backward, always trying to get into the penalty area. He needed more experience, but everything you see now was there then.”Such is the biography of most of Fernandes’s peers among the world’s finest players, of course. The transcendent gifts, obvious to all, that win a place on soccer’s fast track to greatness. The place at one of the world’s foremost talent factories. A season or two in the first team and then the vindication of a lucrative, headline-grabbing move to England or Spain.But while Fernandes’s starting point and destination fit that pattern, there is no straight line that can be drawn between the Fernandes that Martelinho knew and the one that he, and the rest of the world, sees today, the one that has blossomed — over the last year — into the driving force behind Manchester United’s resurgence.Instead, he has taken a more circuitous path, one that involved a season in Italy’s second division and several more in the less glamorous corners of that country’s top league, years that would leave him essentially “anonymous” — to use Martelinho’s word — in his homeland until he was in his mid-20s.Fernandes’s story could be seen as an uplifting tale of delayed gratification, hard work paying off, perseverance and dedication. Or it could be interpreted as a cautionary tale of a deep-rooted inefficiency in how soccer narrows its search for talent, a reminder that the margins between success and failure are fine, and that destiny can sometimes hinge on something as simple as a bus.Bruno Fernandes has scored 11 goals as a revitalized Manchester United has risen to the top of the Premier League.Credit…Pool photo by Clive BrunskillA Calculated GambleAs the chief scout for Novara — an Italian soccer team based in a small town west of Milan and, that season, struggling at the foot of Serie A — Cristiano Giaretta was used to unsolicited calls from agents offering players that might be of interest.When a Portuguese agent named Miguel Pinho got in touch with Giaretta in 2012 to recommend a teenage midfielder at Boavista, he might easily have disregarded it. His job involved tracking hundreds of players across much of Europe. He had never heard of Pinho, and he had never heard of Bruno Fernandes.Nor, really, should he have. Though Boavista is traditionally the second team in Portugal’s second city, Porto, financial turmoil had, at the time, left it struggling in the third division. Its youth system had a good reputation, but by common consensus the cream of the country’s endless supply of young soccer talent was corralled in the academies of its big three clubs: Benfica, Sporting and F.C. Porto.Fernandes had the chance to sign for at least one of them. Born in Maia, not far from Porto, he had been spotted by both Porto and Boavista while playing in a youth tournament. Both offered him a place in their academy. He chose Boavista, apparently, because it volunteered to send a minibus to take him to training, and neither of his parents could drive.It is a version of the story that his former coach Martelinho, for one, disputes. “I think he believed he could get into the first team more easily at Boavista,” he said. “I made the same choice when I was a player, and for the same reason. It is a smaller club, so it is easier to play.”With Fernandes and Marcus Rashford, among others, United heads to Liverpool on Sunday newly confident in its Premier League title chances.Credit…Pool photo by Owen HumphreysWhatever the reason, it may have been the decision that would define Fernandes’s path. Porto’s youth games attract scouts from across Europe, scouring the grass for Portugal’s next great prospect. Boavista’s do not.Had he signed with Porto, Fernandes might have followed the more familiar route to fame and fortune. He might at least have won the attention of the selectors for Portugal’s various age-group teams, another shop window for the next generation of young talent.At Boavista, he was effectively in the shadows. “He was never called up for the national teams,” Martelinho said. “I don’t know why, though there were lots of talented players in his generation.” The vast majority of them, of course, came with the added luster of playing for one of Portugal’s established giants.It was that oversight that gave Giaretta an opening, and took Fernandes down a different route. On the phone, Pinho seemed a “serious” sort of person, Giaretta said, so he did not dismiss the idea as nothing more than an agent’s pitch. He traveled to the north of Portugal to watch the 17-year-old Fernandes in an academy game.“My first impression was good, but not exceptional,” Giaretta said. “You could see the technical quality. His decision-making was better than average. He was light on his feet. But he wasn’t by far the best player on the pitch or anything.” Meeting Fernandes swayed him.“You could see, straightaway, that you were in front of a grown-up,” he said. Giaretta decided to recommend that Novara move to sign the teenager.Giaretta does not know whether Boavista did not hold out much hope for Fernandes’s development, or whether the club was in such a weakened financial state that it simply could not afford to say no, but Novara eventually paid less than $50,000 to sign him. “Every transfer is a risk,” he said. “But yes, this was a calculated gamble. Even the loss of a few thousand euros would have been a blow for the club.”He had decided to spend it on Fernandes, an unheralded 17-year-old, one that nobody else seemed to value especially highly, from a club in Portugal’s third division, one that nobody seemed to bother to watch. Eight years later, Fernandes would cost Manchester United $97 million.Udinese was the second of three stops during Fernandes’s successful, if unsatisfying, foray to Italy. He returned to Portugal in 2017.Credit…Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTwo and a half years at Sporting revived Fernandes, and reset his price. A year ago, Manchester United paid 80 million euros (about $97 million) for him.Credit…Filipe Amorim/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Lessons of the Long Way AroundFrancesco Guidolin was intrigued. As coach of Udinese, he was used to being presented with talented young players drawn from across the world, promising, polyglot teenagers plucked from relative obscurity by the club’s unrivaled network of scouts. It was rare, though, to find one of them picked up so close to home.Fernandes’s stay at Novara had been brief: only a year, in fact, in which he won a place in the club’s first team, scored four times in 23 games, earned the nickname — the Maradona of Novara — before he was sold, at a vast profit, to Udinese in Serie A. Giaretta was central to that, too; he left Novara for Udinese in 2013, and recommended Fernandes to his new employer.Guidolin had not seen much of Fernandes at Novara. When Fernandes arrived at Udinese, Guidolin was “curious” to see what this teenager with the unusual career path was like. “We went into training camp before the season,” Guidolin said. “Playing in Serie B and playing in Serie A are different things, but straightaway you could see that he was ready.”Indeed, Guidolin felt that, perhaps, Fernandes’s early exposure to senior soccer — even at a lower level — had been in his interest. “A year in Serie B is a more complete experience than arriving straight from the youth system,” he said of players who move to Italy. “You could see that he had more certainty, took more responsibility, than most players his age.”Looking at his trajectory since, it is possible to wonder if, perhaps, taking the long way around has worked in Fernandes’s favor. What stands out now to all of those who worked with him in his early days is his willingness to lead: to carry a team, even one as heavy as Manchester United, on his back.Perhaps he learned that in those years he spent among the game’s lesser lights: one at Novara, three at Udinese, one at Sampdoria. By the summer of 2017, when he returned to Portugal — as the second-most-expensive signing in Sporting’s history — he had still not received a call-up to Portugal’s national team (though he had captained its under-21 side). His arrival was not heralded as a coup. “Most of the big teams had not seen much of him,” Martelinho said.And yet, within just a few months, it was obvious what Portugal had been missing. “The Portuguese league is not as strong as England, Spain or Germany,” Martelinho said. “But it is maybe the fifth- or sixth-best league in Europe. It is not easy. Bruno made it look easy.”His impact in England has been no less swift. It is not yet 12 full months since he arrived at Old Trafford, yet he has already been voted into one Premier League team of the season, and, with his team emerging as contenders to end a seven-year wait for a championship, he would rank among the leading candidates to win this campaign’s player of the year award.And yet if his rise seems rapid, it is anything but. Fernandes has had to wait for this moment. Not through any fault of his own, but through a flaw in soccer’s structure, through its inability to look for talent in unexpected places. This was the player he always was, and always could be. It just took the game a while to notice, and all because he needed to take a bus, all those years ago.“The way he is now,” a former coach of Fernandes says, “is the way he always was.”Credit…Pool photo by Peter PowellAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Data, Diet and Better Set Pieces: Seeking Soccer’s Future

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNumbers, Knowledge and Better Set Pieces: a View Into Soccer’s FutureF.C. Midtjylland’s search for competitive advantage has made it a place where ideas emerge. The problem is pretty soon everyone else has them, too.The world’s best clubs are already getting a competitive edge through psychology, data and nutrition. The next frontier? Better set pieces.Credit…Clockwise from top left, EPA, via Shutterstock; Steven Paston, via AP; pool photo by Laurence Griffiths; The New York TimesDec. 30, 2020, 1:00 a.m. ETEverything that happens at F.C. Midtjylland is quantified. Well, almost everything. Every game played by every one of the Danish soccer club’s teams produces data points in the thousands. Each training session, from the first team to the preteens in the academy, is recorded and codified and analyzed.The only exception is a game that happens on Fridays at lunchtime, pitting two teams of staff members — coaches and analysts and communications officers and sports scientists — against each other. It is a chance for everyone to let off steam at the end of the week, a reminder of the importance of having fun, said Soren Berg, Midtjylland’s head of analysis.“We joke about doing video and data analysis on it,” he said, though perhaps it is best left unexamined. “The players probably do not need to see it,” he joked as he watched the game earlier this month. “You know, we tell them a lot about press intensity. And I do not see a lot of press intensity out there.”Midtjylland has numbers on everything else. The club knows how much its players have run and what they have done in the gym and what they have eaten and where they shoot from and how well they have slept. It is attempting to know even the most intimate parts of their minds: how they think, how they feel, how they learn.Midtjylland’s analysts collect data on every player from every match, every training session, every workout.Credit…Ritzau Scanpix Denmark/via ReutersMidtjylland, founded in 1999, has what its sporting director, Svend Graversen, regards as a “growth mind-set.”“We are a new club,” he explained. “We are not dragged down by history because we don’t have any. So we have to make our own.” It is willing to try new things, to seek competitive edges wherever it can find them.The approach has worked. This young, ambitious club from Herning — a quiet city in the middle of Jutland, “a long way from Copenhagen,” according to Rasmus Ankersen, the team’s chairman — now sits not only at the pinnacle of Danish soccer, a three-time national champion and a regular in continental competitions, but at the very cutting edge of the sport.Midtjylland’s search for competitive advantage has made it a place where ideas emerge. It was the first team in Denmark to make its young prospects train every day. It was one of the first teams to embrace the use of data in recruitment, training and playing style. It employed a full-time coach just for throw-ins.Now, of course, all those ideas have been adopted at clubs of far greater scale, of far richer history. Where Midtjylland has gone, Europe has generally followed. Danish academies train every day. The vast majority of teams across Europe are committing vast resources to building teams of analysts and statisticians and physicists. Thomas Gronnemark, the throw-in coach, now works for Liverpool.That is the fate of the pioneer, of course: Once the trail has been blazed, everyone and anyone is free to follow it. Ideas forged in Herning have been adopted and adapted and occasionally lifted wholesale. All Midtjylland can do is what it has always done: try, once again, to see what the future looks like, so that everyone else might, once again, follow.Low-Hanging FruitIn the days after the death of Diego Maradona, Ankersen found himself — like so many others — trawling through grainy footage of the maestro at work. He would not have been alone in noticing that Maradona seemed to be a Technicolor player in a black-and-white world. “In those clips from the ’80s and ’90s, the game seems so slow,” he said.What is important, though, is that it did not seem that way at the time. “The coaches would have said that they could not train more, that they could not make the players get thinner or more athletic,” he said. It is a reminder, to him, of a kind of end-of-history illusion: how easily the current version of something — soccer, in this case — is assumed to be final, complete.Awareness of that illusion is baked into everything Midtjylland does. “The first thing you have to remember is that success now does not mean success in the future,” said Berg, the head of analysis. “We try to be innovative, but it is fundamental that you have to stay curious.”Not all of soccer’s innovations make sense in the test phase.Credit…Pool photo by Jon SuperLooking back, Ankersen regards the first few edges his club found to be “simple” ones: coaching academy players every day, rather than three times a week, was an easy win. But while he accepts that the search is now a little more complex, he does not believe soccer has yet cleared away all of the low-hanging fruit.“There are a lot of areas on the physical side,” he said, improvements that can be made in conditioning and strength and, particularly, in the individualization of training programs, understanding what types of fitness are required by players in specific positions. Soccer’s interest in fields like nutrition, recovery and sleep, too, is still young.He is eager to explore whether structured coaching from earlier ages might help the technical development of young players — “the next edge is starting earlier” — and turn generating talent into less of an exercise in panning for gold. “At the moment, it is a little like investing in a start-up,” he said of player development. “The upside is potentially great, but there is a lot of risk, because most of the investments will not work out.”And Ankersen is convinced that even Midtjylland, the great data evangelist, has only scratched the surface in terms of what analytics can do. “The quality and collection of data is still poor,” he said. “Most of it is event data, but most of football happens without the ball.” Artificial intelligence, he believes, will help to improve that considerable blind spot, as tracking data grows more sophisticated.Those technologies, of course, will eventually be available to everyone, just as performance data is sold now. The next great battleground will not, then, be which teams use data and which do not. It will not be who has the most data or, to some extent, who has the best data. Soccer’s next leap forward hinges on who uses that data best.F.C. Midtjylland’s soccer laboratory is in Herning, Denmark.Credit…Bo Amstrup/EPA, via ShutterstockSpeaking FootballThere is one area in which there is clearly no competitive edge for Midtjylland: telling journalists, in depth, about its work. Graversen, Berg and Ankersen are all amiable, thoughtful, helpful sorts, happy to talk about principles and philosophies and approaches. As is often the case when writing about the use of data in soccer, precise examples are thin on the ground. Knowledge is power, after all, but it is also proprietary.A single question, though, underpins much of what analysts do, of what they ask their data to show: How can the game be played more effectively?Midtjylland, for example, is better at set pieces than any team in Europe. “Over the last five years, we have scored more goals than anyone else that way,” Ankersen said. “The gap between us and the team in second is the same as the gap between the team in second and the team in 73rd.”That is no accident. Ralf Rangnick, the German coach, technical director and all-purpose visionary, is confident that soccer as a whole will place greater emphasis on set pieces in the years to come. Teams will develop specialized routines and updated training methods to maximize what is, across the world, a reliable source of goals.Midtjylland is there already. The club maintains an extensive set-piece playbook, continually updated with new routines and ideas. “A quarter of all goals come from set pieces,” Graversen said. “But the culture in football is defined, and it is very hard to shift.”Some coaches contend set pieces, which can be practiced, are ripe for exploitation as an offensive weapon.Credit…Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images for F.C. MidtjyllandThere is a measure of preoccupation, too, with shot location. Over the last decade, the N.B.A. has undergone a seismic shift in where and how its teams score their points. To the minds of those at Midtjylland, the same effect may be felt in soccer by discouraging players from taking shots from low-percentage positions, and encouraging them instead to work the ball into higher probability areas.“And if shot locations are changing, then why not optimal passes?” Ankersen said. “You can model the right decision to make in each moment because football is a controlled environment: You have data going back 50 years, when the game was still inherently the same, to feed into it.”The challenge, Berg said, is not finding out this information. It is conveying it to players, incorporating it into the way a team plays, taking it off the screen and onto the field. “Doing it on Excel is one thing,” he said. “What matters is, who can deliver that data in a way that suits the style of play?”Ankersen puts it another way: To get the most out of the information at their fingertips, clubs need to be able to get through to their players. “You have to make it relevant,” he said. “You have to speak football.” It is why this club that can turn everything into numbers now thinks, more than anything, about people.Bodo/Glimt set a host of records on its way to its first Norwegian title.Credit…Fredrik Varfjell/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Person Behind the PlayerOften, Bjorn Mannsverk’s sessions get deeply, intensely personal. He encourages the players who meet in his office every few weeks to share their innermost thoughts with him, and with their teammates. They talk not only about their professional worries, but their domestic ones. Sometimes, there are tears.Mannsverk, a former fighter pilot in the Norwegian air force, now serves — in a part-time capacity — as the team psychologist to Bodo/Glimt, the team from the Far North of the country that in November claimed its first national championship, breaking a host of records along the way.To Bodo’s players, Mannsverk and the environment he has created — one that focuses on performance, not results — has been vital to their success. He has, in the words of the team captain Ulrik Saltnes, emboldened them to play the “kamikaze” style that allows them to confront their fears.It is no surprise that Ankersen, at Midtjylland, is fascinated by Bodo’s story. Midtjylland, too, has a psychologist with a military background: B.S. Christiansen, a former member of the Danish huntsmen corps. Midtjylland, too, spends as much time thinking about the personalities of its players as their technical abilities.“We have to take care of the person behind the player,” Graversen said. “We have to be his or her family.”That paternal approach applies, he said, to all employees, whether they are on the field or not. But it is also another attempt to find a competitive advantage. By making the players feel more valued, the club feels it is better placed to draw out their best performances.Understanding the psychology and the personality of players is still fresh ground for soccer, but Midtjylland — as the success of Mannsverk and Bodo suggests — sees it not as uncharted territory but as a frontier to be claimed.The club is currently running one study, alongside one of Denmark’s largest data firms, to identify which traits are shared by players who have thrived there in the past. At the same time, they are working with educational consultants to work out how players absorb information, how they think, how they learn. In an era when soccer is saturated by data, Graversen sees that knowledge as crucial.“The next key thing is getting data into the playing style,” he said. “By finding out the way they learn, we can accelerate getting those principles into the way we play. We can design virtual reality tools to help them train. We can give them more useful feedback. In the next few years, the team that accelerates that process as much as possible will have the edge.”That, ultimately, is what Midtjylland has always done: search for an edge, wherever one might be found. And where it has blazed the trail, the rest of European soccer has followed. If Midtjylland, the game’s great laboratory, is thinking not just about what players do with their feet but what they do with their minds, then it is reasonable to assume, sooner or later, everyone else will, too.Midtjylland won Monday and will enjoy Christmas, and its winter break, from the top of the table.Credit…Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Roberto Firmino's Goal Vaults Liverpool Over Tottenham in Premier League

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerLiverpool Pulls in Front, but Premier League Race Has Far to GoA lineup altered by injury, and supplemented by youth, summons the energy to beat Tottenham at Anfield.Roberto Firmino’s header in the 90th minute gave Liverpool a 2-1 victory over Tottenham at Anfield.Credit…Pool photo by Peter PowellDec. 16, 2020Updated 7:44 p.m. ETLIVERPOOL, England — José Mourinho left one name off his list. The Tottenham manager had been busy using his final news conference before his team’s trip to Liverpool to indulge his taste — and his talent — for sophistry, trying to prove Jürgen Klopp’s squad was not quite as threadbare as has been advertised by reeling off names of all the players that would be available.It is an act that has been polished to precision, but even Mourinho seemed to sense he was pushing his luck just a little. He got through the defense OK, and no manager blanks on Liverpool’s front line, but the midfield was more of a problem.He could not think who might join Georginio Wijnaldum and Jordan Henderson in Liverpool’s midfield. Nothing sparked — in the end, he could name only 10 players, which definitely proved a point, but not the one he was making — and so he moved on, not letting facts get in the way of a good argument.Next time, he may not make the same mistake. Mohamed Salah might have given Liverpool the lead against Tottenham on Wednesday. Roberto Firmino might have scored the goal that deprived Spurs of a merited point and sent the reigning champion to a 2-1 victory, and to the top of the Premier League table. Henderson might have provided the moment that will boil Mourinho’s blood, his subtle nudge on Eric Dier clearing a path for Firmino to strike.But much of Liverpool’s play ran through the midfielder Mourinho forgot. Curtis Jones signaled his promise, just short of a year ago, with considerable noise: a spectacular, curling shot to give a youthful Liverpool team a derby victory against Everton in an F.A. Cup tie at Anfield. The game — broadcast live on the BBC — attracted an audience of 7.2 million people, two or three times what most Premier League games command.Jones’s rise since then, though, has been curiously quiet, particularly for a locally-reared talent at one of England’s grandest clubs. He started just one Premier League game after soccer’s restart in June; he made just a couple of substitute appearances — offering flashes of his ability, no more — in the opening weeks of this season.More and more players have fallen by the wayside, though, as Klopp’s squad has been stripped by injury — eight senior players were missing against Spurs, with two more available only as substitutes — and Jones has had to step up. He has started four of Liverpool’s last five league games, and four of its six Champions League appointments so far.And yet he has become an established presence in Liverpool’s side almost unnoticed. That is, perhaps, because having one of the Premier League’s academies produce a gifted young player is not quite so rare as it once was. England — all of a sudden — has a glut of talent in its late teens and early twenties, capturing the imagination at even the most demanding clubs.Curtis Jones, 19, held his own against Lucas Moura and everyone else he tangled with in Tottenham’s midfield.Credit…Pool photo by Clive BrunskillManchester City has Phil Foden, Manchester United has Mason Greenwood, Chelsea has Mason Mount. The days when it was rare for a young English player to make the grade, for him to be given a chance in the Premier League, are long gone. It is no longer possible to celebrate each one individually, as it would have been even five years ago. There just is not the time.Jones’s progress, too, is testament to the circumstances in which he has been given his chance. Liverpool’s early season has been defined by injuries: not just the season-ending damage sustained by Virgil van Dijk and Joe Gomez, but the seemingly endless run of needling, niggling problems that have made Klopp such an ardent advocate for teams to be able to call on more substitutes. A hamstring here, a knee problem there, three weeks out, four weeks out, another game with Liverpool’s resources depleted.It creates a phenomenon in which watching Liverpool is to note that which is absent more than what is present: How will Klopp’s team cope without Van Dijk? Does it have the same aura without any of its senior, specialist central defenders? Is it running out of energy? Has it lost its spark? It has been so powerful that it has been possible not to notice Liverpool’s presence close to, or now at, the summit of the Premier League.But most of all, Jones’s transition into Liverpool’s team has been so smooth because of him. His teammates joke about his self-assurance, his lack of doubt, his iron self-belief. Klopp has found that he is not backward in coming forward, in asserting that he should, perhaps, be in the team ahead of some of the celebrated stars who have conquered both England and Europe with this team.All of that manifests in his play. Jones demands the ball constantly, drifting into space, directing his teammates, dictating the game. He is not cowed by the standards he must meet. His colleagues have responded with the most significant judgment of all: their trust. It is possible not to notice Jones because he looks like he belongs.None of that, though, should diminish what an achievement it is both for him — winning a place in one of Europe’s best teams at age 19 is, after all, no mean feat — and for Liverpool.By the time Firmino scored his goal, the winning goal, Klopp’s players had been running on fumes for some time. The high-tempo, high-intensity style he demands is being pushed to its limits by the relentlessness of this season. Sadio Mané seemed diminished. Salah had drifted out onto the right flank, hoping something might happen, rather than believing that it would.Steven Bergwijn missed two golden chances to put Tottenham ahead in the second half.Credit…Pool photo by Peter PowellHarry Kane drove an open header into the ground. The bounce carried it over the goal.Credit…Pool photo by Peter PowellBut when Firmino rose above Toby Alderweireld and planted his header past Spurs goalkeeper Hugo Lloris, he seemed to get a burst of adrenaline. He turned and sprinted along the field, across the halfway line, back toward the Kop, where the 2,000 fans permitted entry were punching the air in delight.He — and they — knew this was a significant step on what remains a long and arduous road. The Premier League table is packed tight. Liverpool is only eight points ahead of Wolves, and Wolves are 10th. Spurs and Chelsea and Leicester, as well as both Manchester clubs, lie menacing.Under the circumstances — given Liverpool’s injury list, whether Mourinho regards it as valid or not — the fact that Klopp has his team ahead of them all, even if only for now, is to his immense credit. But it is to the credit, too, of the players who have stepped into the breach, Jones prime among them. Mourinho, you suspect, will not be the last to learn his name.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Ralf Rangnick Is Soccer's Most Intriguing Free Agent

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerThe Oracle Is Speaking Again. Who Will Listen This Time?The pressing style Ralf Rangnick once preached to a skeptical German audience is now soccer orthodoxy. As he seeks his next project, he is again peering into the sport’s future.Ralf Rangnick’s philosophies helped build the Red Bull soccer empire, and were adopted by some of Europe’s leading clubs.Credit…Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy More