Julian Nagelsmann always wanted to be Bayern Munich manager. It was the job he coveted more than any other during his meteoric rise, back when he was European soccer’s coming force, its baby-faced managerial prodigy, an outsider who was overturning conventional wisdom of what a coach should look like, what steps they needed to take, how old they really ought to be.
When he left his first job, at the equally neophyte Hoffenheim, for RB Leipzig, it was with the express purpose of positioning himself to take charge at Bayern. Leipzig was his designated intermediate step, the place where he would go to get from here to there, to where he always wanted to be.
And though the move worked, he never felt quite like a natural fit with Bayern Munich. The images, early on in his tenure, of him scooting around Bayern’s training facility at Sabenerstrasse on a hoverboard felt somehow jarring, a Silicon Valley tech bro on vacation at Neuschwanstein. There always seemed to be just a hint of unease in the air: a hunt for a mole here, an unwarranted, unedifying outburst there.
If the timing of his demise is curious — he was set to be fired on Friday, with his team in second place in the Bundesliga, a point behind its next opponent, and with a Champions League quarterfinal on the horizon — then the fact of it was not. Bayern places great stock in having a coach whose face fits. It is a shifting, vague criterion, but one that condemned him in the end. Nagelsmann never felt right, not quite.
His solace, of course, is not simply the Bundesliga title he picked up in his first and only full season in Munich — proof that nobody fails at Bayern, not in any meaningful sense of the word — but the fact that he will be able to parlay that experience into something else soon enough.
Bayern, it turns out, will not be his final destination. Nagelsmann will now be a contender for any of the handful of elite jobs that becomes available. Once a manager has broken through that ceiling, after all, it quickly transforms into a floor. The best evidence for that is the man who is reportedly replacing him: Thomas Tuchel, fired by Paris St.-Germain and fired by Chelsea, but hired in an instant by Bayern. For Nagelsmann, Munich will be just another step along the way.
Rory Smith
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