Julian Nagelsmann becomes head coach of the German national football team

The new head coach of the German national team, four-time world champion and three-time European champion, is 36-year-old Julian Nagelsmann. The young specialist, who won German championship gold with Bayern in 2022, will have to lead his new players out of the crisis they found themselves in under the leadership of Nagelsmann’s predecessor Hansi Flick, and prepare them for the home European Championship.

The appointment of Julian Nagelsmann as head coach of the German national team, announced by the German Football Association (DBF), did not come as a surprise. It was Nagelsmann who was considered perhaps the only real contender for this position after the dismissal of Hansi Flick early last week. The 36-year-old specialist, however, had some contractual obligations with Bayern, from which he was unexpectedly fired in the spring of this year, but now this issue has been resolved. As a result, the German national team received the youngest head coach since it was headed in 1926 by 34-year-old Otto Hertz, who worked for ten years and won bronze medals with her at the second world championship – 1934 in Italy.

DBF’s contract with Nagelsmann, however, has so far been concluded for a minimum period of ten months.

On June 14, 2024, the final stage of the European Championship begins in Germany, which will last exactly a month. Of course, the host team got into it without selection. “The European Championship in our country is a special event that takes place once in several decades. I really want to take on this challenge, and next season we must become more united than ever,” stressed Julian Nagelsmann, whose continued tenure at the head of the national team will clearly directly depend on the results of the home tournament. Being a four-time world champion, the German team won the continental championship three times, and the last time this happened quite a long time ago, in 1996.

It is obvious that Julian Nagelsmann’s immediate task is to overcome the crisis into which the national team found itself together with his predecessor Hansi Flick. The results were dismal: Germany failed to advance from the group at last year’s World Cup in Qatar and won just four of their last 17 official matches under Flick, who was sacked after a heavy 4-1 defeat to the Japanese on September 9.

However, a 2-1 victory three days later in a home friendly against the French, in which DBF sporting director Rudi Völler served as Germany’s head coach, speaks volumes about her potential.

Feller himself seems to have no doubts about the correctness of his choice. “He is not just an absolute football expert, but a person who, at a very young age for a head coach, has proven his ability to motivate and inspire football players and those around them. His passion for football is enormous and contagious,” Rudi Feller described the new head coach of the national team.

Julian Nagelsmann’s still short coaching career seems to confirm these words. In 2017, he led the modest Hoffenheim, which a season earlier had almost been relegated from the top division, to the Champions League; in the spring of 2021, he led the previously low-ranked Leipzig to silver medals in the German Championship, and a year later won gold with Bayern. The controversial dismissal of Nagelsmann by the giant club in March, which preferred the more experienced Thomas Tuchel to him, is proven by the fact that after the change of head coach, the Munich team immediately flew out of the Champions League, and they finished first in the championship largely by accident – due to the fact that in the final tour, Borussia Dortmund, the leader at that time, lost points at home.

At the same time, it is clear that after Flick’s dismissal, the DFB management essentially had no other reliable option other than the appointment of Julian Nagelsmann.

Nagelsmann, in whom media resources attributed interest to Chelsea, Tottenham, and PSG last off-season, turned out to be the only available specialist suitable for the position of head coach of the German national team according to all the main criteria. She will play her next friendly matches under his leadership in mid-October overseas – in Hartford against the US national team and in Philadelphia against the Mexican national team. And at the end of November in Vienna there will be a meeting between the Germans and the Austrians.

Evgeniy Fedyakov