Marcel Sabitzer looked ahead undaunted, this Tuesday in the Olympic stadium in Berlin, and said: “Collective aggression to press the ball.” He had been asked why Austria has become the revelation team of the Euro Cup, leader of Group D above the Mbappé’s France, lto Van Dijk’s Holland and Lewandowski’s Poland, and the midfielder pointed to the man next to him. There was Ralf Rangnick, triple institution as a coach, founder of the Red Bull football school, and great patriarch of the gegenpressing, the tactical mechanism that seeks to recover the ball immediately after losing it, with a collective maneuver of suffocation of the rival that, if not well organized, can cause the drowning of the person who practices it, since after stealing the ball it must be removed from the quagmire healthy and save.
“Whoever bet on us as leaders of group D will have become rich,” said Rangnick, with a little smile.
Germany boasts a long list of innovative coaches so far this century: Jürgen Klopp, Julian Nagelsmann, Thomas Tüchel, Hansi Flick and Joachim Löw. They all have something in common. When they evoke the last great myth of the origin of the modern game, they pronounce the word gegenpressing as if naming a god whom it would be wise not to cross. The consensus is that the inventor was Rangnick, an Austrian by birth, and the person questioned specifies a date: Sunday 21 September 2008, 5:00 p.m., Carl-Benz Stadium in Mannheim.
“I coached Hoffenheim,” he says; “We had just been promoted to the Bundesliga and defeated Dortmund 4-1. On the following day, Jürgen Klopp wrote a letter to Dortmund fans that was published in the club’s official programme. He said: ‘The way Hoffenheim put pressure on us will be our reference point.’”
Karl Nehammer, Austria’s federal chancellor, went to the team’s locker room to sing with the players after the 3-2 victory against the Netherlands. It was an exhibition of gratitude for the feat that consecrates Red Bull, the multinational energy drink company, as the great transformer of sport in the country. It was the co-owner of the company, Dietrich Mateschitz, who, on the advice of Franz Beckenbauer, bought Leipzig and Salzburg in 2006, invested more than 200 million euros in players and infrastructure, and hired Rangnick to found a school that would function as a chain. of player production. Today the backbone of the team is basically made up of them.
Few teams in the world function as club teams and there are practically none that are more ideological than Austria. Up to six of the players who participated against the Netherlands passed through Leipzig, Salzburg or their subsidiary, Liefering: Prass, the right back; Seiwald, the midfielder; Schmid, author of 2-2; Baumgartner, the assistant interior of the 3-2; Laimer, Bayern midfielder; and Sabitzer, author of the 3-2. They are all masters of pressure after loss. They all play from the age of 17 in professional categories, because only then are they eligible, and they were all promoted by virtue of a primordial quality that serves both to steal the ball and to keep it. “The main evaluation criterion is mental,” explains the coach; “You should only measure players by the decisions they make in the moments of the game when there is no time or space to act. Goals and beautiful dribbles can confuse you when judging footballers.”
Sabitzer and his companions demonstrated it to the frightened Dutch. They are the revelation of the Euro Cup.
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