D.ie words that Oliver Mintzlaff chose on late Friday evening reached Jesse Marsch directly. Marsch, still prevented because of a Covid disease, sat at home in front of the TV and heard the 1: 2 defeat at Union Berlin estimated. Mintzlaff chose the words “catastrophic” and “desolate” before he said in principle on the broadcasting station DAZN: “We have 18 points from 14 games, that is not enough for our claim. We have a squad that is definitely one of the three or four best in the Bundesliga. That is also our claim. We’re not going to bury our heads in the sand until Christmas and hope that the New Year will get better. We have to worry.

The Leipzig managing director and his employees then gave thought to the result that Marsch is no longer head coach of RB Leipzig with immediate effect. Achim Beierlorzer will look after the team in the final match on Tuesday in the Champions League against Manchester City (6.45 p.m. in the FAZ live ticker for the Champions League and DAZN), which is about qualifying for the Europa League. A successor for march should be presented “promptly”, it said on the part of the club.

The defeat at Union brought Mintzlaff to the final realization that there was no improvement in sight. In Berlin, RB lost the third Bundesliga game in a row and left the impression of being further away from the top flight than ever before. The interim goal by Christopher Nkunku was only due to a serious dropout by Union goalkeeper Andreas Luthe, the goals conceded by Taiwo Awoniyi and Timo Baumgartl an expression of the current Leipzig uncertainty.

Severe infection in RB

In the final assessment of his work, Marsch no longer benefited from the fact that the team sometimes showed intoxicating football, as it did recently in the 5-0 win in Bruges. Rather, such appearances strengthened those responsible around Mintzlaff in what this cadre would actually be able to achieve.

The symptoms that RB has been suffering from since the beginning of the season have long since developed into a serious infection. The team lacks stability in all areas and, above all, confidence in their own abilities. Marsch had underestimated the transformation process that he subjected the team to. While the team under Julian Nagelsmann had intensified their work on solutions with the ball, Marsch wanted to turn back time and cultivate ball hunting again, as was fashionable in the early Leipzig years under the supervision of Ralf Rangnick.

But he was able to train much more intensively than his predecessor. It didn’t take long before part of the squad that was at least studded with EM drivers wondered about the new approach. But they showed even less understanding for the style change prescribed by Marsch. Nagelsmann’s ball possession football was particularly popular with supporters such as Emil Forsberg, Dani Olmo, Kevin Kampl and Angeliño. The same applied to the defensive back three, which first made Marsch back into a back four before returning to the old system on the advice of the team.

The many changes not only cause displeasure, but also helplessness. Managers like Captain Peter Gulacsi repeatedly indicated that the team was not comfortable with the new, old guidelines. “The team was not 100 percent ready to follow this conviction and the match plans,” said Mintzlaff on Sunday in the television program “Doppelpass”.

After all, the squad is no longer put together for radical pressing like it used to be. Most clearly visible was a striker André Silva. The war came for more than 20 million euros from Frankfurt, where he had scored 28 goals last season. In Leipzig, however, he was a stranger to the running-intensive tasks that Marsch loved for him. The clarity with which the winners and losers of the coach change soon emerged was unusual even for a professional. While Nkunku scored goal after goal, the Spaniard Angeliño was only a shadow of himself, to name just two personalities.

Marsch’s list of shortcomings is long, but part of the truth is that the American came to Leipzig at a very inopportune time. In addition to the successful and later coach Nagelsmann, defenders Dayot Upamecano and Ibrahima Konaté left the club in the summer. Shortly before the end of the transfer deadline, captain Marcel Sabitzer followed his trainer to Munich. As in the case of Nagelsmann, Sabitzer had the impression that. A serious miscalculation.

Marsch found a team that had just lost its key executives. Sports director Markus Krösche was also one of the employees who left in the summer. His post has still not been filled five months after he left. Much at RB Leipzig is currently in a vacuum, not just on the field.

For the time being, Achim Beierlorzer WILL be responsible as a trainer, a longer employment as a boss is not planned. Mintzlaff said that RB wanted to present a new coach “by the second half of the season at the latest”. The candidates include the courted Edin Terzic, who is believed to be the ideal solution. Roger Schmidt and Zsolt Löw are also possible alternatives. Both were trained at the Red Bull locations in Leipzig and Salzburg and embody the typical RB style. Like Jesse Marsch. His time in Leipzig should have shown the unlucky there, however, that highly qualified coaches are not available in abundance in the RB empire.