It’s a Friday afternoon, and the bright winter sun is pouring through the windows at RB Leipzig’s training complex.
Marcel Schafer, the club’s sporting director, is perched on a stool, reflecting on the past year.
“The most important lesson was that we had to build a team. We have always tried to create winning situations, but the most important thing compared to last year is that everyone, both inside the club and even those in the stadium, has the feeling that there’s now a team on the pitch. There’s a group of players, with the ball and without the ball, who have common goals.”
Within those words lies the complexity of Schafer’s role.
Leipzig are a star-builder club in the grand scheme of European football. They recruit well and young, selling their best players on to those teams at the summit of the game for large profits. The challenge is to balance that role with achievements of their own on matchday.
Last year, those ratios were wrong.
Leipzig limped home in seventh place in the Bundesliga, their lowest finish since first being promoted to German football’s top flight in 2016. They had sacked their head coach, Marco Rose, in the March of that season and the dressing room was dogged by whispers about unrest, with some players accused of focusing on individual aims above those of the team.
It was an opportunity for a reset.
Three key players were sold last summer — Benjamin Sesko, Xavi Simons and Lois Openda. Ole Werner, previously in charge of Werder Bremen for the previous four seasons, was named head coach. And Schafer led a fresh round of recruitment to restock the squad.
The results? A young, thrusting team who started 2025-26 with verve and consistency, winning seven of their first nine league games. The day after The Athletic met Schafer last month, Leipzig lost badly at home to Bayern Munich (5-1) and then stuttered through the following weeks, carelessly giving away a late lead to draw 1-1 away to St. Pauli, before losing 2-1 at home to Mainz.
But, most recently, a 2-1 win away to Koln on Sunday has Werner’s side back up to fourth place, well positioned to qualify for the Champions League, and facing Bayern again tonight (Wednesday) in Munich, this time in the quarter-finals of the DFB-Pokal.
Werner was an interesting choice as manager.
“At both clubs, it was the same,” Schafer says, discussing the appointment. “Neither was the strongest economically, but he developed individual players and he developed teams. For a coach, he’s young — 37 — and he’s hungry. He still has potential, and that was the profile we were looking for in a coach, with all the people here we have who can provide support.
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“We talked with three different coaches. In the media, apparently, it was about 20, but it was honestly just three. We made the choice for Ole after four really good conversations. The first was about expectations on both sides and how we would work together. Then, what our philosophies were and how they would come together. Then, how would he lead the team, and (finally) how he would develop the players.
“He might not be the most famous coach, especially outside Germany, but this decision was all about expertise: could he identify with our philosophy and embody our way? We were convinced.”
So far, they were right to be.
The iffy form either side of the Bundesliga’s winter break was inconvenient, but partially explainable through injuries and Africa Cup of Nations absences. Across the season as a whole, there have also been significant individual improvements.
On Sunday, Christoph Baumgartner, the Austria international midfielder, scored both goals in that victory over Koln; with 14 goal involvements in 20 league appearances, the 26-year-old has already had the most productive season of his career. Germany full-back David Raum, who was made club captain ahead of the season, is also in fine form.
Another triumph has been Yan Diomande.
Today, the 19-year-old Ivory Coast international is among the most-coveted young players in European football. He spent his late teens playing academy football in Daytona Beach, Florida, after his family moved to the United States when he was a child, and as recently as 18 months ago was turning out for Leganes’ B team in the Spanish second division.
He was promoted to the senior side midway through last season, but accumulated fewer than 600 top-flight minutes in 10 appearances, just six of them starts. Leipzig had seen enough, though, spending €20million (£17.4m; $23.8m at the current rates) on the winger in the summer.
A risk?
“An opportunity,” says Schafer.
“We’ve changed our system. For many years, we played a 4-2-2-2 without wingers — or with inverted wingers. Now, after the arrival of Jurgen Klopp, we want to play with clear wingers who have an athletic profile, have high intensity with and against the ball, and who excel in one-on-one situations, and of course have scoring ability and speed.
“So those were our key performance indicators for those positions. With Yan, once we’d seen the video and data, we didn’t have to watch 10 more games. So our advantage, I think, was that we were really early because I think we had not even played 200 minutes in the league, and we were already there, knowing that he was exactly the profile we were looking for in the summer. It was a 100 per cent match from our side.”
In January last year, former Borussia Dortmund and Liverpool manager Klopp was presented as the multi-club Red Bull stable’s new global head of soccer, and he has proven an important influence on playing style, but also an extremely valuable part of Leipzig’s recruiting armoury, helping with the identification and signing of talent.
“During the (transfer) process, in the conversations with the agents, the families, and the player, if Jurgen is in the room, speaking about our project and our vision, he has something unique. He has a god-given talent to capture people in just a few minutes,” Schafer says.
“But it’s not only Jurgen. We have Mario Gomez involved in the process, and he’s a former striker who achieved almost everything (including two domestic league and cup doubles with Bayern Munich) and knows every feeling that football players have in the dressing room. So we have a lot of perspectives.”
Over the summer, those perspectives aligned on winger Johan Bakayoko from Dutch champions PSV, Turkish side Goztepe’s Brazilian forward Romulo, and Conrad Harder, who had been signed as now Arsenal striker Viktor Gyokeres’ eventual successor at Sporting CP in Portugal. Ezechiel Banzuzi, a 20-year-old Dutch midfielder from Belgian club Leuven, has also shown bursts of promise.
Werner’s coaching has also had a positive effect on Antonio Nusa, the Norwegian starlet who moved to the club early last season from Belgium’s Club Brugge, and Assan Ouedraogo, a now 19-year-old German midfielder recruited from Schalke in that same window who made a goalscoring debut for Julian Nagelsmann’s national team in November. Most recently, Brajan Gruda was signed on loan from Brighton of the Premier League for the rest of the season.
If there’s a sense of new beginnings at Leipzig — of a team restyled, redrawn and rebalanced — then that impression exists in their operations away from the pitch, too.
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At the end of last year, an impressive new four-storey office block was opened in the city’s Cottaweg district that will now be a working home to 300 members of staff who, previously, were spread out disparately at sites around the training complex.
Leipzig are such a divisive topic in German football following their rapid rise up through the divisions after Red Bull’s 2009 arrival, and provoke such a strong response that it can be easy to forget how young they still are as a club.
Until very recently, staff had to book half-hour slots to go for lunch at the canteen to avoid overcrowding. The new premises, built a few hundred yards from the training pitches, comprise as fine a facility as there is in the Bundesliga.
Down the road, there’s a fresh face in charge of the academy, too.
Last June, Manuel Baum, the club’s head of youth development, announced that he was leaving the job for personal reasons. He was replaced with David Wagner, previously head coach of Huddersfield Town and Norwich City in England and Schalke in Germany. Wagner has left day-to-day coaching behind to try to grapple with one of the issues Leipzig have been trying to address for years.
While they have an excellent record for recruiting youngsters from elsewhere, Leipzig are still to develop much homegrown talent. The club have produced players for other Bundesliga clubs — Stuttgart forward Ermedin Demirovic is the most prominent currently — but are yet to successfully nurture anyone into becoming one of their own first-team regulars. It’s a significant weakness.
“One issue is that we are still very young,” Wagner explains. “We don’t have 50 or 60 years of experience in football. Plus, we grew very fast and were super-successful, especially with our first team. This means — and it’s totally normal from my point of view — that not every department was able to grow as quickly as our first team, and one of those departments was the academy.
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“The infrastructure, in general, is great, but we now have to find the right players, especially in terms of their mindset, to make sure they keep their hunger in paradise. That’s a problem you sometimes face in an environment like this.
“But it’s up to us. We have had a lot of discussions about a second team — should we have a B team or not? There are a lot of conversations about this. Do we use our multi-club owner system well enough, or have we done it well enough in the past? Maybe not. How can we do it better?”
Wagner was best man at Klopp’s 2005 wedding to wife Ulla, the two men have been close friends since they were team-mates at Mainz. That a straight line now exists from the Leipzig academy to the top of Red Bull’s entire footballing department is a clear strength. But whether they are finally able to start producing their own first-team players will depend on many more factors, including a reputation which they currently do not possess.
“We have a proven record of finding 18-, 19-, 20-year-old top talents all over the world, especially in Europe, of taking them, picking them and giving them a chance. It’s very useful. But we don’t have a proven record of getting 15-year-old kids, developing them over three years, and then helping them make the step into the first team. So, if I call an agent of a 15-year-old, they might think he would be better going to Borussia Dortmund or Liverpool.”
Changing that will take time, Wagner concedes, as well as success — and luck — in multiple areas. He has confidence in some of the players under his charge now, but does not want to create expectations by naming them. And, he emphasises, their future success will not only be decided by them.
“We have to improve our ability to find and develop top players. That’s the first thing. Then you have to have a manager who is brave enough to give young kids a chance, even if they are not proven,” Wagner says. “This is the truth: anyone who is established at Bundesliga level had to have that moment when he was allowed to show that he was capable of performing.
“So, you need that manager, then you need a sporting director who creates a squad where there are spots for academy players in every single session, allowing the first-team coaches a chance to see them: to get a real picture of them and to really fall in love with the academy products. And then, obviously, luck. The player needs the right results: perhaps a few injuries, or a heavy schedule with a lot of games, (then) his moment pops up and he gets that chance.
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“If all of these things come together in the future, then that will be when things fall into place.”
There are a lot of ifs and maybes. This might be the most talented group of players Leipzig have ever had. Werner might be precisely the right coach to harness that potential. The academy might be ready to supplement Schafer’s first-team recruitment.
Like every club in Germany other than Bayern, Leipzig’s ability to challenge for major honours depends on many things going right at once.
This time, they hope, everything really is properly aligned.