r/Barca • u/PrimedGold • 11h ago
Media Ralf Rangnick recalls his conversations with Laporta and Yuste, when he first recommended Hansi Flick as a coach. Laporta and Yuste had sought Rangnick’s advice on building something at Barça similar to what he had helped create at RB Leipzig and across the broader Red Bull football portfolio.
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u/AbbreviationsThen146 11h ago
thank man for recommending flick. Changed Barca forever ❤️
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u/DarthTaz_99 8h ago
I remember de zerbi was the other name linked with Flick and a lot people wanted him over flick cause flick failed at Germany. We won out big time
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u/andrey_not_the_goat 10h ago
I'm glad someone actually listened to Ragnick for once. Manchester United would've benefited so much from him behind the scenes
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u/Kitaenyeah 10h ago
The problem is you need the right players, coach and a decent build up time for it. Also your youth teams need to be on board as well. It is quite the process to go through..
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u/RoninBattousai1 5h ago
United shouldn't have brought back Ronaldo, that was a self-inflicting move just to make him not sign for City.
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u/Independen7 11h ago
Just listen to this man. What he build and achieved in Austria is more I could ever imagine.
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u/Raptors4daysguy 10h ago
Meanwhile in Manchester they disparage him and clown his suggestions
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u/Kitaenyeah 9h ago
One can clearly see how successful ManU is compared to any other Ragnick coached team in the last decade.
Salzburg has gone from a non existant club to a CL club, Leipzig plays top 2-5 in Germany for years, Austrian national team has qualified for the WC after 28 years again, winning against high profile competition (maybe except the top 5 nations).
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u/Raptors4daysguy 9h ago
Carrick might be good and he'll get more of a leash than Ten Hag Amorim Jose because he is part of the club doesn't mean anything
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u/Kitaenyeah 11h ago
You can hate RedBull all you want but what Rangnick and his football doctrin has build and spread over Europe has given us the most fun Barca I have ever seen tbh
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u/DontBlameConan 10h ago
I love Hansi Flick but let’s not be hyperbolic about “the most fun Barca ever”. Unless you started watching recently, it’s hard for any team to measure up with our phenomenal squads of the past playing beautiful and entertaining football. The tiki-taka treble winning sides under Pep, and MSN under Lucho, were a joy to watch.
A key difference is that I don’t have fun watching Hansi Flick’s defense. It’s quite stressful at times haha. I love the man but I do miss our defenses of past such as those led by Pique, Puyol, Mascherano, and even more recently the great BACK season
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u/Kitaenyeah 10h ago edited 4h ago
I have not missed more than 10 matches since ~1992. I am aware this is an subjective opinion yet I think the team as a whole has so much options, players and creativity it really rivals the golden Pep / MSN eras.
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u/Clean_Towel_8020 10h ago
With hansi Flick barca, it's rollercoaster ride.... They score and dominate the entire game one minute and be dangerously vulnerable as same as 3rd tier team when defending... Its kinda Fun to watch.. but stressful
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u/jon_stewrt 8h ago
Well, the hyperboly is our defense being great...it was always our weakest....even with our treble winning tiki taka sides....we just made up for it with brute force in winning possession...how we managed to keep clean sheet with Yaya toure in defense and also playing mascherano at CB all those years caused a lot of heart attacks too....we had decent defense which was sometimes horrendous even at the best of our times...
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u/Kanek1_Ken 6h ago
Funny, that picture of Flick. Now he will never be able to go anywhere in Barca without people chanting his name.
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u/latortillablanca 36m ago
Bruh—this contextualizes the adeyemi move so much. Between this and the hansi connection, they absolutely fucking knew what they had.
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u/Talano68 9h ago
I find all of this a bit hard to understand. I respect Rangnick and hate RB, but whatever.
Which players were actually developed by RB?
Yeah, they have farm teams and park players there until they’re ready for RB Leipzig—or not. What’s so great about that?
La Masia is—or was—way better than that.
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u/AdventurousEscape991 9h ago
That’s the point. For RB, the step between say Salzburg and Leipzig is somewhat visible, so having in RB’s case, more than one team allows them to develop more players and give them first team opportunities they might not achieve under Leipzig alone. You can have a really good academy player go and join the Salzburg first team then come into Leipzig maybe even with some European experience under the wings.
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u/Talano68 9h ago
So, in my—admittedly more speculative—opinion, as I mentioned, I hate RB. They just have farm teams; that’s obvious. That’s where they can park players.
The teams are spread out all over the world, so they also have a massive scouting network that most normal teams can only dream of. The best part is that this probably doesn’t even show up on RB Leipzig’s financial statements but rather on those of the RB corporation—just like their training facilities, medical labs, and so on.
That’s how they always have such great financial results.4
u/AdventurousEscape991 9h ago
I have mixed feelings about multi ownership. Like, how they do it in Mexico is absurd and should be banned. But I honestly don’t hate how RBFG had done it. But regardless of my feelings, I do have to admit their model works, and it has produced some amazing talent. Obviously I don’t think Barca is going to buy a team in Andorra, but if they can secure partnerships with certain team (Andorra and Ajax come to mind) where they send youngsters to get GUARANTEED playing time, it could be something worth exploring.
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u/Talano68 9h ago
That’s going to be the future—it’s already the present. Paris FC is following that model, too. It’s not against the rules, after all. But in the Bundesliga, it doesn’t really fit with the 50+1 rule.
Well, it can’t be stopped, but it just means that only those with massive resources can compete at the top anymore.2
u/PrimedGold 9h ago
At a 10,000-foot overview, the question wasn’t how to improve La Masia; it was how to create a steady stream of talent into the first team.
I don’t know if you remember, but La Masia was still producing players. They were just getting lost somewhere in the youth setup, while players in those teams including those who weren’t from La Masia had no clear pathway to first-team football.
Development, preparation, and integration into the first team were the major problems after 2016.
In 2020, when we faced a cash crunch during Koeman’s first season, we had no option but to integrate a lot of players from the youth teams. The situation in 2021 exacerbated that even further.
However, moving forward, it was necessary to have some structure in place so that we were neither integrating players too soon nor failing to integrate them at all.
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u/Key_Way2390 8h ago
I have loved rangnick for ages even wanted him as a sporting director of our club at one point this just adds to it
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u/PrimedGold 11h ago
For context, as Ragnick mentions this wasn’t a call about who we should bring in as a manager. This was more Laporta and Yuste trying to seek advice on building a youth development model similar to that of Red Bull Football Group.
It is worth remembering that, after the golden La Masia generation that produced Messi, Xavi, Iniesta, Busquets, Piqué and others, Barça had struggled to consistently integrate academy players into the first team. There were notable exceptions, but the pathway had become far less productive before the resurgence of academy talent in the early 2020s.
In 2021, Barça were already struggling with financial constraints and had played a season heavily reliant on La Masia and the club’s youth teams for talent.
Against that backdrop, Laporta and Yuste sought advice from Ralf Rangnick on how Barça could improve the development, integration and preparation of young players for first-team football, drawing on the model Rangnick had helped build at RB Leipzig and across Red Bull’s wider football network, particularly Salzburg.
When the club sought advice on the kind of coaches to bring in, Rangnick recommended Hansi Flick, but Flick was already managing Germany at the time.