Report: “All of this is fantastic” for Jesse Marsch in Leipzig

RB Leipzig’s 2019 winter training camp gets underway on January 4, and there will be a lot of eyes new arrival Tyler Adams. Lest we forget, however, that Leipzig already has a successful transplant from the New York branch of Papa Red Bull’s global soccer family, Leipziger Volkszeitung’s Guido Schafer sat down with Jesse Marsch to find out how he has been enjoying his first few months at the club. And Marsch has no complaints at all:

It was the most intense, educational and beautiful six months of my coaching life. Ralf, the club, the team, the team around the team, the fans - all of this is fantastic.

It’s an interview you might be better off running past a friend who is fluent in German rather than Google Translate, but in summary, Jesse offers glowing reports on his time with RBL to date, his experience working with the man who put the Ralf in RalfBall - Ralf Rangnick - and, of course, Tyler Adams. And beetroot.

Rules, discipline, structure, ambition. All of that is also a kind of beauty for me. Incidentally, I like Wiener schnitzel. And beetroot.

He makes no secret of his ambition to take on a head coaching job again (he left that role at RBNY to be an assistant to Ralf Rangnick at RBL):

That’s the plan, that must be the plan. Until then I want to help and learn in Leipzig.

Marsch’s contract with RBL reportedly runs to 2020, meaning he’s currently on track to serve at least one season as assistant to Leipzig’s next head coach, Julian Nagelsmann - who is almost 15 years younger than Marsch and younger than all three of the players (Dax McCarty, Sacha Kljestan, and Luis Robles) who captained RBNY in Marsch’s tenure at the club. He is unfazed by the prospect of working for a (much) younger coach:

So what? Life is not black or white, but colorful.

Nagelsmann’s pending move from Hoffenheim to Leipzig may yet precipitate a coaching change at RB Salzburg - so this might not be the last time Marsch is asked whether he intends to stick around in Leipzig after the new coach arrives.

Until then, however, he has a squad to prepare for the second half of the Bundesliga season, and a familiar face to welcome to Leipzig and help settle in to a squad rather urgently in need of reinforcements.