The revolving door of Premier League management turned again with Bob Bradley’s sacking from Swansea City. For the second December running first-team coach Alan Curtis was appointed as interim boss as the club looked for the right man to keep them up. Were this situation played out in Germany, Curtis would have stood a better chance of getting the job – which went to Paul Clement – as shown by recent events at Augsburg, who promoted youth team coach Manuel Baum last month after they had sacked Dirk Schuster.

Unlike Bradley, who was critiqued for not having managed in the Premier League before, Baum hasn’t been decried for his lack of experience. It would have been a strange thing to level at Baum, given that 12 other Bundesliga sides are run by coaches who had no previous experience of managing in the league before moving into their current roles.

Baum represents a growing trend this season, with Augsburg becoming the fifth Bundesliga club to appoint someone who had never led a club in the league before. Very few people outside of Augsburg had even heard of Baum but his promotion illustrates a wider point about how German clubs view managerial appointments. In the last five years, 12 of the current 18 Bundesliga clubs have promoted a first-team coach from within. What’s more, 11 of those 12 clubs promoted coaches who had been working with younger talent in their academies.

Compare that to the Premier League over the same timeframe and it applies to just four of the current 20 teams. Garry Monk was captain at Swansea before taking on the manager’s role; Mike Phelan had previously been assistant manager to Steve Bruce at Hull; Tim Sherwood was first-team coach at Spurs before his brief spell as manager; and then there’s Billy McKinlay, who was given the Watford job for a week while they were playing in the Championship.



None of these four coaches had been working with the youth teams before stepping up. That isn’t necessarily a problem, as Borussia Dortmund coach Thomas Tuchel explains: “There are top coaches who were never involved in youth teams and top coaches who did go through that process.”

Yet there are quite a few benefits to this route, of which Tuchel is the poster boy. He started his coaching career with the Stuttgart Under-19s, then took a job with Augsburg’s reserves, before moving on to Mainz, where his work with the Under-23s impressed the club so much that they gave him the top job when Jürgen Klopp left for Borussia Dortmund in 2009. Tuchel did well at Mainz and, when Borussia Dortmund needed a new manager in 2015, he replaced Klopp for a second time.

Tuchel believes German football is now benefitting from a “second wave” of coaches who have developed bonds with young players in their academies. “It took time after the first wave of Bundesliga youth academies were set up [in 2000] and began to bring through and educate a different type of player, who have since left their mark on the Bundesliga. But now you see that there are far more young players brought through here in Germany, in that system, playing in the first and second divisions. The next wave is that the coaches, who were responsible for bringing through these players, are also given the responsibility.”

Another coach riding this second wave alongside Baum is 29-year-old Hoffenheim coach Julian Nagelsmann. He led Hoffenheim’s youth team to the German Under-19 title back in June 2014, sealing the success with a thumping 5-0 win over Daniel Stendel’s Hannover in the final. Within two years of that game, both Nagelsmann and Stendel were managing their clubs.

Hoffenheim’s 17-year-old midfielder Nadiem Amiri scored twice in that final in 2014. He went on to make his Bundesliga debut the following February, a year before Nagelsmann became coach in 2016. When Nagelsmann eventually took charge, Amiri, unsurprisingly, was very much at the heart of his plans.

Most of the time, it works the other way around. Following their own promotions, these rookie coaches look to give opportunities to the youth players they worked with in the academies. The Bundesliga enjoyed a feelgood story when one of these bonds came to fruition earlier this season. Ousman Manneh fled Gambia as a 17-year-old refugee and settled in Germany in 2014. He joined Werder Bremen a year later and started playing for their Under-23s, where he was coached by Alexander Nouri. When Nouri was promoted to the top job at Bremen in October, Manneh made the step up too – and scored his first goal for the club in a 2-1 win over Bayer Leverkusen. “I can’t believe this,” said Mannehas he reflected on his journey to the top. “Is this real or am I dreaming? This is the greatest moment of my life.”

With German clubs on the lookout for new ideas, older coaches can struggle to find work when they are fired. At 48, you wouldn’t call Uwe Rösler “old”, but he falls into the “experienced” category. He is well acquainted with both English and German football and has managed seven clubs in the last 13 years.

“Everything in life goes in circles,” says Rösler about the current trend in Germany. “There will be times again when more experienced people will again be getting chances.” Rösler made it to the final two on Nürnberg’s shortlist when they were looking for a manager last summer, but the second division club opted for Alois Schwartz, a coach with more experience in the Bundesliga 2.

After 10 months out of the game, Rösler was picked up by Fleetwood last July and has guided into play-off contention. Finding a job was easier in England as his experience was deemed more valuable. “You have a heart operation,” he says. “Will you will give that operation to a young doctor who has done 100 operations in his career as a heart surgeon or give it to a 60-year-old one, who has done 10,000 heart operations?” Rösler’s analogy suits an English game where “foreign owners, very wealthy business people [are] investing hundreds of millions of pounds in football clubs” and do not want to trust unproven managers.

The knock-on effect, of course, is that homegrown coaches in England are denied opportunities to climb the ladder. “German football in that way is ahead of English football,” says Rösler. “I speak a lot to English coaches. We’re getting less and less of them in the Premier League, even in the Championship.”

As for Germany, Rösler believes the clubs are more concerned about stability when appointing someone from within. “They are bringing consistency in the playing style. They are also very often cheap solutions because this is a chance for those young coaches to get into first-team football.”

The current trend of promoting young coaches in Germany may paint an idyllic picture, but Bundesliga clubs are as prone to panic as their English counterparts. All but one of the 12 clubs that have promoted internally in the past five years were partly forced to do so by sacking their previous manager – and the other coach, Lucien Favre, resigned from his job at Borussia Mönchengladbach last September after losing the first five games of the season.

But the way Bundesliga clubs nurture potential replacements presents a cheaper solution that benefits young coaches, young players and the clubs themselves. Hoffenheim’s unbeaten run to fifth place under 29-year-old Nagelsmann is testament to that. The best part for these beneficiaries, as Tuchel says, is that the second wave has only just begun.

• This is an article from The Set Pieces

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