Rumors: Marco Rose probably won’t be at RB Salzburg next season

RB Salzburg is among the hottest teams in Europe at the moment - unbeaten in all competitions since the start of the 2018-19 season - and that makes its head coach, Marco Rose, one of the hottest tacticians in the game at present.

The rumor mill has not failed to notice Rose’s achievements in Salzburg, connecting him to jobs at Hoffenheim and Bayer Leverkusen (whose coaching vacancy has since been filled), and more recently Manchester United.

The steadily increasing stream of rumors has caused some Austrian outlets to conclude that Rose probably isn’t going to be at Salzburg for much longer. Salzburger Nachrichten notes that RBS’ sporting director Christoph Freund is not pretending his head coach will not be tempted to move on:

Marco feels very well in Salzburg, but the question arises for him as well, what more can I achieve in Salzburg, and the success of 2018 has put him in a good negotiating position.

SPORT1 has picked up on the fact that Rose’s deflection of questions about his future appears very focused on his immediate future but offers no encouragement to the idea he’s committed to seeing out a contract reported to run to the end of the 2019-20 season:

We have a lot in front of this season together and therefore I will not comment on rumors anytime again. My focus is full and entirely on Red Bull Salzburg.

The speculation about Rose’s successor has already begun, with Salzburger Nachrichten proposing LASK’s Oliver Glasner as a likely candidate.

Once A Metro is mostly interested to see how long it takes for Jesse Marsch’s name to emerge in the context of filling a vacancy at RB Salzburg. There have been rumors connecting Marsch to Salzburg in the past, but they were seemingly generated by an American soccer press that was having difficulty interpreting what was going on during RBNY’s turbulent start to 2017 - and with hindsight, those rumors appear to be misreadings of Marsch carving out his path to the assistant coaching position at RB Leipzig that he currently holds.

Now that he has made the move to coaching in Europe, Marsch makes no secret of his ambition to find a head coaching job in due course. He has been a head coach before - with New York Red Bulls - and he has the necessary UEFA qualifications for top-flight coaching in Europe: moving to RB Leipzig was always about bolstering his credentials and visibility for a job running a team in a league brighter and richer than MLS. Throw in Red Bull Global Soccer’s partiality to promoting from within - a tendency that drew Marsch to Leipzig in the first place, and saw his own assistant at RBNY, Chris Armas, seamlessly promoted to head coach of the MLS squad - and there is a ready-made story for the rumor mill when the time comes.