When Yussuf Poulsen arrived at the RB Leipzig training facilities ahead of the 2013-14 season in Germany’s third tier, he saw a club with one eye on the future — even if they could not escape their present.
“Our changing room was in containers,” he told CBS Sports in an exclusive interview. “At that point, our training facility was in the making. They had built the first dome, but they have the plannings and everything ready so it was a place where you could see it was halfway done so the stadium was there. The pitches were there that was on a level of a Bundesliga club already at that point. We were playing in the third league, but the facilities [weren’t], so we were, at that point, halfway there to have the infrastructure of a Bundesliga club.”
It did not take long for Leipzig to complete their vision. Three years after Poulsen arrived, they played their first season in the Bundesliga and finished second. Fueled by the financial might of Red Bull and the leadership of Ralf Rangnick, the architect of the company’s soccer philosophy from 2012 to 2020, Leipzig underwent a rapid transformation that dates back as recently as their first professional game in Germany’s fourth tier in 2009.
The club’s reputation is equally reminiscent of their quick rise from the lower leagues of German soccer to the top echelons of the European game. A system that demands an intense pressing system across Red Bull’s globe-spanning clubs is the defining element, with Leipzig serving as the crowning achievement of the project. Players come and go by design — the club scouts top youth prospects intentionally, providing a platform for them to make a name for themselves and then leave, sometimes in major moves. Look no further than last summer, when Leipzig picked up a transfer fee of nearly $100 million from Manchester City for Josko Gvardiol’s services just three years after picking him up.
Change, though, is not the only constant at Leipzig. Four players who joined the club before Leipzig’s first Bundesliga season are still on the books, including Poulsen and goalkeeper Peter Gulasci, each of whom had a front-row seat to the club’s rapid rise and offer an impressive amount of stability for an ever-evolving team.
“I think it’s just special because if you ask any player, of course, there are different ways or different type of careers but I think to spend such a long time in a club, making those steps with the club and develop with the club, I think there is not many things [that’s] better,” Gulasci said.
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RB Leipzig’s rapid rise
Gulasci may have turned up in Leipzig two years after Poulsen and when the club was in the second division, but for both them and several of their current and former teammates, the same was true. Both of them were young players when they signed for Leipzig, boasting experience in some of Europe’s lesser-watched leagues before moving to another competition in the same category. The aim of their new club to go from the fourth tier to the first in less than a decade was perhaps hard to believe, but Rangnick was a remarkably convincing figure.
“If you’re ever going to meet Ralf Rangnick, then you’re going to believe him, too,” Poulsen said. “I’ll say it like that because he’s convincing … He’s done it before with other clubs, so, of course, you’re going to believe a guy who’s telling me, ‘I’ve worked at this club, this club, this club, and I’ve done exactly what I’ve told everybody with these clubs and now I’m going to do this one, so get on board now, or you’re not going to be part of it.'”
Rangnick and company then compiled a team with players who rose alongside the club to become some of the best players in Europe.
“The crazy thing is if you look at the team we had back in the day in the second division, you see me playing, Willy Orban playing, Lukas Klostermann, Emil Forsberg, Marcel Halstenberg, who just left in the summer, [Marcel] Sabitzer,” Gulasci said. “We had players in the team who actually played probably as starters, five, six, seven years later, in the Champions League knockout stages, so in that time we already put the team together from young talents who later has a potential to play on the highest level.”
Leipzig’s transition from the lower leagues to the top spots of the Bundesliga remains a uniquely impressive feat because of the player recruitment, especially considering the lack of experience at those top levels the early Leipzig teams even had.
“It takes hard work. It takes a group of people who are going to trust each other all the way through with the same goals, the same mindset,” Poulsen said. “We had no one who had already been at that level so we were all hungry and motivated to go there at some point in our career because that’s every guy’s goal, to eventually go and be the best and playing the best leagues and play Champions League … That creates a different kind of energy.”
Their first participation in the UEFA Champions League in the 2017-18 season, Gulasci argued, unlocked a new era for Leipzig.
“Leipzig qualifying for the Champions League … this just changed the whole club, I would say,” Gulasci said. “We suddenly, throughout our first season in the Bundesliga, we just became an international team and that was a massive step because that speeded up our development as a team and as a club like nothing else and we had to, of course, grew up to the challenge — the players, the whole club, the people around the club.”
Rising to new challenges
After reaching the Bundesliga and the Champions League, Leipzig’s priorities shifted to those familiar to Europe’s top club — remaining amongst the elites. The club has had little issue doing so, playing in the Champions League in all but one season since initially qualifying for the competition for the 2017-18 campaign. It did not exactly require a change to their player recruitment strategy, either — they were still looking for diamonds in the rough, but could pick from players who had much higher ceilings.
It means that newcomers walk into a very different environment than Poulsen and Gulasci did around a decade ago, and so they see their mission as maintaining a level of stability even with all of the comings and goings.
“It’s a hard job to get guys to understand what it means and how much energy and time you have to put in to reach that level,” Poulsen said. “Many young players are coming into a team that’s already there and have a different understanding of what it means to be a professional.”
Gulasci was complimentary of the club’s evolving recruitment efforts, saying that the club lands players who fit in more often than not.
“We were quite lucky because if you look at the amount of players and the type of players who came to our club, they were all, first of all, top guys, really, really good guys who understood that quite quickly and the ones who didn’t, didn’t spend much time at the club,” Gulasci said. “I think it’s also very important for our club that we don’t really give up our philosophy or our character. Just for players, it’s the other way around. The players have to adapt to the club and if they don’t do that, then after six months, one year, they will probably leave the club.”
Even today, Leipzig’s squad has a collection of so-called next big things like Benjamin Sesko, Dani Olmo — a European champion with Spain this summer — and perhaps Xavi Simons, who head coach Marco Rose said on Monday has decided to spend another year at the German club. The aim is to improve upon last season’s fourth-place finish, especially after a year in which Bayer Leverkusen disrupted the rhythm of German soccer by snapping Bayern Munich’s 11-year league winning streak.
“They can also see what kind of potential we have in the team and how, in some periods and in some games, we reach a level that is on the top level in Europe and then we go out the next weekend and are not able to put that performance in one more time,” Poulsen said. “That’s often also the downside of having a young squad, that it can be difficult to create that stability all the time and me and Peter [have] been no different when we were 19, 20 but that’s just all it is.”
One club men
It is somewhat rare in soccer for players to stick around in any one place for around a decade; usually, either a player or a club decides that they have outgrown the other’s use. It is even more rare for Poulsen and Gulasci, as well as their fellow veterans, to spend so much time at one club and evolve alongside it. Poulsen said it marks an unconventional route to the top, but one that inspires a feeling of fondness for him.
“I think if you would ask any player what would be the most successful career for you, most of the guys would say, ‘If I could be in the club where I grew up and win the Champions League and be there for the whole career,'” Poulsen said. “We have had that, not maybe where we grew up, but we still have this one club career more or less, where you get a different feeling than changing around from club to club every second year.”
The stability they provide in the locker room is matched by the consistency the city offers them, especially in their personal lives.
“We, as all professionals — if it’s a basketball player or NFL player, we travel a lot,” Gulasci said. “We spend a lot of time away from our families, etc., playing for the national team, but then to have that base and have that stability at home, I think it’s very important and that’s another aspect where we can be really, really grateful to spend so much time in Leipzig and to have that one club and one city for us because it gives the chance to have a very, very stable private life.”
The uniqueness of their careers is not lost on either of them, either.
“To spend such a long time in one club, of course, you have a very special connection with the city, with the fans, with the club, with the region,” Gulasci said. “I think this … has more value than some other stuff and you can always decide different ways, but I think we are very happy and satisfied to have this kind of a career at one club.”
