On the day Jesse Marsch was announced as RB Leipzig’s newest assistant coach, July 9th, the club released a photo on its official Twitter account. There was Marsch, standing in the middle of a coaching scrum, surrounded by his new coworkers. Behind him was Lars Kornetka, a former cutting-edge video analyst for Bayer Leverkusen who had ridden the crest of the analytics wave to Leipzig. Further to his right was Robert Klauss, a 33-year-old ingenue who began his coaching career three years ago coaching the team’s U-17 side after an 11-year playing career.



But the scene, frozen in time like a Renaissance painting, rotated around two central characters: Marsch and the man he is addressing, Ralf Rangnick. In early July, Rangnick was named RB Leipzig’s next head coach, his fourth such appointment in the Bundesliga. Whatever Rangnick’s reputation elsewhere, which has been colored by the inevitable firings that come with the coach’s life, he’s become...