Report: Carolin Dietrich is RB Leipzig’s Head of Internationalization

Earlier this month, RB Leipzig’s chief executive Oliver Mintzlaff revealed to Bild that his club plans to take its show on the road. Mintzlaff said RBL had a three-year plan to raise its profile online and abroad, with arrangements already in place to expand digital content and a broad strategy of marketing RBL more aggressively around the world.

RB Leipzig’s “digitization” and “internationalization” efforts will clearly be a process, and may have absolutely no impact on the New York Red Bulls at all. For a while now, Red Bull Global Soccer appears to have been encouraging its family of clubs to be mostly autonomous, sharing ideas and pooling some resources (loaning a player between clubs here; poaching a head coach to come be an assistant there), but also asked to find ways to to make themselves self-sustaining: which is why RB Salzburg is one of the world’s most successful selling clubs, why RBNY keeps hopefully plugging the availability of naming rights to its stadium, and why RB Leipzig wants to develop a global fanbase that might help reduce its reliance on Papa Red Bull for transfer money (RBL reportedly owes Papa something like $90 million).

So “internationalization” is important to RBL. What it means exactly and whether it is at all significant to RBNY remains to be seen. But Weser-Kurier at least helped the task of keeping an eye on RBL’s new marketing plan by profiling the club’s current “Head of Internationalization”: Carolin Dietrich.

Dietrich is worth profiling not because RBL’s internationalization plans are all that interesting at the moment - they’re not, or at least the parts of them the club is willing to reveal right now don’t amount to much - but because before she joined RBL’s marketing department, Dietrich was one of Germany’s top hurdlers.

Competing under her maiden name, Carolin Nytra was a 100-meters hurdles specialist who ran for Germany at the 2008 and 2012 Olympics. Injury forced her to retire from her sport in 2016, and she took a job working in marketing at RB Leipzig, a club run by her former agent, Oliver Mintzlaff. And now she is in charge of internationalizing RBL.

Weser-Kurier reports she is currently focused on a project in China, but has also visited India, Brazil, and yes, New York, on RBL’s behalf.