After victories over Sporting Portugal (1-5) and Besiktas (2-0), Borussia Dortmund is Ajax’s third opponent in the group stage of the Champions League on Tuesday evening. The team of the German top club has been led by Marco Rose since last summer, who was taken away from Borussia Mönchengladbach for five million euros. Jürgen Klopp’s disciple is slowly but surely following in the footsteps of his great teacher.
By Chris Meijer
Actually, in the summer of 2002, Rose was planning to exchange Hannover 96 for VfB Lübeck. Nice city, close to the sea: the left-back who became redundant in Hanover after promotion to the Bundesliga (‘I was a reliable leader, but I was not an easy player to deal with’) saw himself in the north of Germany live in the Baltic Sea. Still, he decided to talk to the trainer of the also interested FSV Mainz 05. One Jürgen Klopp, a mid-thirties who was at the helm for less than a year at the club where he had spent almost his entire playing career. “We met at the hotel in Mainz and after that conversation I decided not to go to the sea,” Rose said in conversation with the Guardian. “That makes Kloppo special: he can convince you of his ideas. It was clear to me that I would go to Mainz.”
When Mainz was promoted to the Bundesliga two years later, Klopp addressed his group of players. Somewhat aided by the gleeful booze, the current Liverpool manager identified two players who would one day become trainers themselves: Sandro Schwarz and Rose. Klopp would be right, as Schwarz eventually got Mainz under his wing and now works at Dinamo Moscow. However, Rose’s name is much more closely associated with Klopp. Not only because of their collaboration in Mainz, but also because Rose now works for Borussia Dortmund like his old coach. “Of course you use some of his ideas, certain things we did in Mainz training. But in the end you have to be convinced of what you tell your players, what you show them and what you ask of them. So you have to create your own style.”
Rose carefully built up his coaching career. After finishing his active career at Mainz, he started there as an assistant coach of the second team. For his first coaching career, Rose returned home to Leipzig in 2012. Rose – the grandson of single German international Walter Rose, who spent most of his career at Chemie Leipzig – was born in the city that was then still part of the GDR. “I had a great childhood,” Rose, who was thirteen when the Berlin Wall came down, told fohlenecho. He was well aware of the desire for freedom of adults in the former East Germany. “Just like the great euphoria when the wall fell. You carry that with you for a while, but eventually the worlds came together. We had a different standard of living in the East, with different values. Suddenly people lived together with different realities.”
Rose as a player for Mainz in a duel with Roy Makaay, who was then employed by Bayern Munich.
When Rose started working as a trainer at Lokomotive Leipzig, the club was in a much worse position than when he was active there as a youth player and broke through in the first team. “I could only talk about football with myself,” Rose described his year as manager of Lokomotive Leipzig. He finished with the former superpower from the GDR in the middle of the Regionalliga Nordost. Perhaps somewhat disillusioned with the financial and managerial problems gripping Lokomotive Leipzig, he left after just one year to take charge of the Under-16s at Red Bull Salzburg. With Ralf Rangnick, his former trainer at Hannover 96 and then sporting director at Red Bull Salzburg, Rose met an old acquaintance in Austria.
The move to Red Bull Salzburg turned out to be excellent for Rose. An extremely fertile ground for trainers – including Roger Schmidt (PSV), Oliver Glasner (Eintracht Frankfurt), Adi Hütter (Borussia Mönchengladbach), Niko Kovac (AS Monaco), Peter Hyballa (Türkgücü Munich), Thomas Letsch (Vitesse ) and Jesse Marsch (RB Leipzig) previously worked in different positions in Salzburg – different things asked of Rose than in senior football. With Alexander Zickler and René Maric, among others, Rose gathered all his current staff around him during the years in the training of Red Bull Salzburg. “If you’re smart, you surround yourself with experts. I think I know a lot about football, but you have to use specialists and let those people do their job. If you think you know everything and are the best at everything, you will get into trouble.”
‘Most players in the amateurs didn’t even know I had a blog’
Marco Rose is assisted at Borussia Dortmund by the only 29-year-old René Maric, his assistant for years.
Rose spent a total of four years in the Red Bull Salzburg youth academy, coaching the Under-16s and Under-18s, before being moved up to the first team. His undisputed pinnacle as a youth coach was winning the 2017 Youth League, the first ever European trophy for an Austrian club, by defeating Manchester City in succession – including Phil Foden, Jadon Sancho, Tosin Adarabioyo and Brahim Díaz – Paris Saint-Germain, Atletico Madrid, Barcelona and Benfica. With the first team of Red Bull Salzburg, Rose also experienced its peak on the European podium in addition to two won national titles – a formality for Red Bull Salzburg in recent years – and an Austrian cup, by reaching the semi-finals of the 2017/18 season. to reach the Europa League.
It was one of the reasons for Borussia Mönchengladbach to bring Rose to Germany. “We scout very intensively and that’s why Marco has been in our picture for some time. As a sports director you almost never have the chance to get the trainer you want. Ninety percent of the time you choose someone who is on the market and who fits best after the trainer who has left, but that is almost never the solution you want. If Marco hadn’t been on the market or declined our offers, it would have made sense to continue with Dieter Hecking,” said Max Eberl, sporting director at Borussia Mönchengladbach. Goal. It turned out to be a good choice: Rose led that Fohlen to the Champions League and guided the club to the knockout stage for the first time since 1977.
“Believe me, they don’t train players like Berghuis, Malen, Depay or Gakpo”
Voetbalzone previously wrote a background story about the influence of the training of Red Bull Salzburg on Austrian football.
Still, Rose is unlikely to get a statue outside Borussia Park. His decision to leave for Borussia Dortmund has not gone down well with some of the supporters. Bee BVB Rose was actually the dreamed definitive successor to Lucien Favre, who was fired halfway through last season and initially received a temporary successor with Edin Terzic. Borussia Dortmund had been eyeing Rose for some time, as his philosophy is closest to Klopp’s. Klopp was the last coach to keep Bayern Munich from the league title with Borussia Dortmund. Thomas Tuchel and Favre failed to do so with a slightly more conservative philosophy, while Peter Bosz played a little too much on the attack.
The link between Klopp and Rose is never far away: the vision of the current Borussia Dortmund coach has been described as Kloppian. Rose ranks as a coach who can be emotional on the sidelines, tactically strong, media-handling and developing youth players. “Jürgen shaped us, I especially learned a lot from his way of dealing with people. Maybe there are some parallels with Jürgen, but I have found my own style. We want to be active on the ball, sprint a lot. We want to win high balls and try to get to the goal as soon as possible after conquering. Our game has to be fast and dynamic,” Rose said in an interview with The Independent. His philosophy also includes some aspects that he took with him from his youth in the GDR. “Teamwork, values, enthusiasm to train, structure: that sort of thing.”
Klopp was the last coach to become champion with Borussia Dortmund for the time being.
With eighteen points from eight games, Borussia Dortmund – one point less than leader Bayern Munich – has not started the season badly, although the infirmary has recently been filled with no fewer than thirteen players. During the 3-1 home game against Mainz, Rose was able to call on Thomas Meunier, Mats Hummels, Emre Can, Gregor Kobel and Erling Braut Haaland again last Saturday. “Erling wanted to. He is not 100 percent and not yet pain free. The coming weeks will be challenging with Ajax, Bundesliga, DFB Pokal, Bundesliga, Ajax again, Bundesliga. That’s a lot of games and we need every player for that,” Rose said after the game against Mainz, in which Haaland scored twice.
Rose will need Haaland desperately next season to keep Bayern Munich from the German title for the first time in ten years, as he had to be tactically flexible in the first phase of the season due to the personnel problems in his selection. Should Rose actually manage to become champions with Borussia Dortmund, the resemblance to Klopp will only grow. It is not without reason that his name has already been mentioned several times in England. “I never sit at home thinking: within ten years I want to be a manager of Manchester United or Liverpool. Of course I have time to think about that and maybe it would be interesting to become a manager in the Premier League one day. But now I feel very good in Germany, in the Bundesliga.”