Fabian Hurzeler is discussing the brutal self-assessment that changed his life. The realisation at the age of 23 that he would not make it to the top as a player with boyhood club Bayern Munich and that his future instead lay in coaching.
“I was a clever player, but I was not the fastest,” says the 31-year-old German now steering Brighton & Hove Albion in the Premier League. “I couldn’t defend my own box and I couldn’t score. So, I was really honest with myself. I said: ‘You won’t make it to be one of the really, really high talented players.’”
Yet, having regularly been told as a youngster that he really did have a chance of making it, the decision to give up on his first dream was still a difficult one. But he made the bold move: “I decided to stop my playing career and I fully focused on my other passion, being a coach.”
What had this forward-thinking manager been like as a central midfielder? “Honestly, when you talk to some of the guys who I played against, they would say: ‘What an asshole’.
Hurzeler playing for Germany Under-16s against France in 2009 (Pierre Minier/Getty Images)
“Not to my team-mates; I was always a leader, I was a captain. I love taking responsibility and I loved being there for them and I always protected them. If a referee made a bad decision, I went hard on him and always tried to protect my team-mates and tried to win the game. It was always about winning the game.”
That winning mentality has continued as a coach. Hurzeler is animated on the touchline, often complaining to the officials. He was booked at Arsenal in August for protesting about a tackle by Declan Rice on Joel Veltman, which led to the first of two yellow cards for the subsequently dismissed England midfielder.
And Hurzeler was sent off with opposite number Nuno Espirito Santo in the home draw against Nottingham Forest in September for entering the field of play without the referee’s permission after Forest midfielder Morgan Gibbs-White received a red card for a foul on Joao Pedro.
Hurzeler says: “That’s something that was deep in the DNA at Bayern Munich. You have to go to every game, every tournament, to win it — no matter if you were 12, 14 or 16 years old, you have to go there and win. And that was my only thinking when I was on the pitch: ‘How do we win this game?’
“Off the pitch, I can have fun, but when we were on the pitch, it was winning, winning, winning. And that’s the same with my family. When I’m sitting with my family, let’s say at Christmas time and we played games and I lost the game, the night was over for me.”
Brighton’s appointment of Hurzeler in June may have made him the youngest-ever permanent head coach or manager in the Premier League, aged 31 and 110 days, but he already had eight years of coaching experience in Germany’s lower tiers, with national junior teams and at St Pauli. He masterminded the transformation of the club based in Hamburg into 2.Bundesliga title winners last season.
Three months on from his official unveiling at Brighton’s training complex in Lancing, Hurzeler is in the same room explaining his unorthodox route to a Premier League dugout.
Hurzeler celebrates scoring for Bayern in a youth team match against Hertha Berlin in 2012 (Nadine Rupp/Getty Images)
One of four children, Hurzeler was born in Houston, Texas to a Swiss father and German mother. They had moved to the U.S. for work, but when Hurzeler was two, the family moved to the Bogenhausen district of Munich. He grew up a Bayern fan — his earliest memory of watching football crying as a six-year-old having seen his team dramatically lose to Manchester United in the 1999 Champions League final.
Hurzeler was in Bayern’s youth system from the age of 11, progressing through the age groups to the reserves, alongside players who have gone on to feature in top leagues and played in major international tournaments, such as Emre Can and Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg, having also played alongside the likes of Antonio Rudiger for Germany’s under-17 side (Hurzeler was capped 21 times by his country at various junior levels).
“It was always my dream, to become a professional football player,” he says. “And that’s an interesting thing, because my parents are dentists and people would say: ‘Oh, he has such a good life. He gets everything from his parents and his life is made — he doesn’t have to work for anything’.
“I was really strictly educated and always really professional. I didn’t drink alcohol, for example, until I was 18. I didn’t go to any party until I was 18. If I had a girlfriend and she went to a party, I would say: ‘No, I have to stay at home. I have to wake up in the morning and go to training’. I really worked hard and I really made a lot of sacrifices in my life to become a professional football player.”
Hurzeler made 20 appearances for Bayern’s under-17s, played 56 games for the under-19s, 36 matches for the reserves and trained with the first team without ever making the final step.
“Jupp Heynckes was a great coach. I had the opportunity to train a little bit with him. I experienced Erik ten Hag too. So, I was close to getting to the first team but something was missing.
Jupp Heynckes was one of the coaches to have an influence on Hurzeler (Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)
“I moved Hoffenheim to play for the first team, but two or three weeks after pre-season, the coach said I wasn’t in his plans.”
Hurzeler made 29 league appearances for Hoffenheim’s reserves between 2013 and 2015, then 45 appearances across the following two seasons with 1860 Munich’s reserves — all in Germany’s fourth tier. Things were not going as he had hoped.
“I was asking myself: ‘OK, you make so many sacrifices but what do you want to achieve in your life?’.
“I said to myself: ‘Alright, maybe you will play in the third division, maybe even the second division, but you will never get to the Bundesliga‘.
“A lot of people didn’t understand it. They said I could easily play in maybe the second or third division, but they will never understand the feeling inside of me, what I really want to achieve, my vision in life.
“In these moments I have a gut feeling. Maybe it’s not rational.
“It was the same when I got the call from Brighton in the summer. Of course, there are rational arguments to stay at (St Pauli), it was my comfort zone. It was there where I made great achievements, where I had a great club, I had great people around me.”
“But in the end, it’s my life, my responsibility, and I felt I had to go for this challenge.”
Hurzeler launched his alternative route to elite level at FC Pipinsried, an amateur club in Germany’s fifth tier, based in the Bavarian countryside, north of Munich. They were promoted in his first year as player-coach in 2016-17.
To make ends meet, Hurzeler combined football with other jobs, including a spell as an art dealer. There were valuable early lessons on the art of coaching and scrutiny when Pipinsried lost their first seven games in the fourth tier. Hurzeler says: “I was sitting in a coffee shop and then the media called and said: ‘Do you think if you lose the next game you will still be the coach?’ I had to deal with this business really early. I was trusting the process and trusting what we did before. So I didn’t panic and try to make the turnaround by changing thousands of things.”
Although wholesale change was not necessary in that moment, Hurzeler soon learned the need to adapt to circumstances. “We went up by playing with a lot of possession,” he says. “I was stubborn and said: ‘I will continue playing like this because it’s my style of play. I want to have ball possession. I want to control the opponent’.
“But it went completely wrong. I didn’t have the balance of defence and stability. I was always thinking, because of my career as a player at Bayern Munich, I needed to control the game, that we needed to win the game beautifully. I learned that it’s not about that, (you need) to find a good balance between defence and offence.”
Hurzeler certainly had that balance at St Pauli last season, guiding them to the 2.Bundesliga title by scoring an average of nearly two goals per game in tandem with the best defensive record in the division.
St Pauli won 36 of Hurzeler’s 55 competitive matches in charge (Ross Parker/Getty Images)
Like so many elite coaches, he is clearly completely obsessed with football. He switches off by playing padel, but most of his spare time is spent watching matches from different leagues around the globe to see what he can learn. He explains that his reading choices are books “about mindset” by high performers such as Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.
Hurzeler’s insatiable work ethic is a legacy of his upbringing — his father insisted on early-morning bike journeys in all weathers to drop his son off at the train station for school, instead of travelling by car.
That tough love has paid off. His brother is a pilot, his older sister rebuilds ailing companies and his younger sister is a strength coach at college for an American football team, as Hurzeler thrives in his chosen profession.
His football mentors through his unorthodox pathway into coaching — including spells as Germany Under-18s and Under-20s assistant — are a combination of those he has observed and others he has worked with closely.
“I’ve watched a lot of football and still watch a lot of football,” he says. “And, of course, you look at the Premier League and the German coaches there have been — Thomas Tuchel, Jurgen Klopp. I didn’t sit with them at a table and talk 24 hours about football. I would love to do it. But it’s not possible.
“So, it’s more about watching them and learning from them. That’s one side. On the other side, I had great coaches in my youth when I was a player. I remember Daniel Bierofka (former player and coach at 1860 Munchen) — he was a great player in Germany.
“And I had Mehmet Scholl as a coach (Bayern Munich II) and I really learned from them what it needs to win games and what it needs to behave like a professional football player.
“I had great mentors at the German federation. Meikel Schonweitz (former Germany Under-20s manager) helped me a lot. He still gives me a lot of advice. So, for me, it’s very important to have people around me who I can trust and who don’t come to me and give compliments. Because I think you get enough compliments when you do great things. It’s more important to get critical feedback, because compliments won’t help you in your development.”
Meikel Schonweitz, now technical director at Mainz, is in regular contact with Hurzeler (Martin Stoever/Getty Images)
Hurzeler is still watching and learning. The process does not stop just because he has been propelled into the Premier League with Brighton. “Last season, Leverkusen played amazing football,” he says. “Stuttgart I liked to watch. In the Premier League, of course, Arsenal, (Manchester) City, but also smaller teams.
“For example, Urs Fischer at Union Berlin, when he really created success with his team. I watched them a lot, I watched (Crystal Palace’s Oliver) Glasner a lot when he was the coach of Frankfurt.
“Not only the top teams. Also average teams or lower teams. I think it is also important to see what they are doing. Because Brighton is a very good club, still not a top, top club. One day we will get there, but you need to find a way to get there.”
Hurzeler has found a way in his first seven league games at Brighton to be undefeated against Ten Hag, Mikel Arteta and Ange Postecoglou, beating Manchester United (2-1) and Tottenham (3-2) at home and holding Arsenal to a 1-1 draw at the Emirates.
Hurzeler picked Postecoglou’s brains in a trip to Tottenham’s training ground during the winter lull in the Bundesliga with St Pauli last year which also included studying Brighton training sessions under former head coach Roberto De Zerbi. “I was not a player long under Erik ten Hag (in Bayern’s reserves), but of course you experience a little bit of his ideas and it was the same with Ange,” Hurzeler says.
Hurzeler has had a bright start to life as Brighton boss (Steven Paston/Getty Images)
“I read it was a big thing in the media. I went there just to talk with him about football, just to hear his experiences and also to learn from these coaches, because in the end they all had great careers so far. Me as a young coach, I have to also learn from what they experienced and to listen to them. I always say God gives us two ears and one mouth to listen more than just to talk. In the beginning, of course, I have to have my own experience and my own ideas, but also learning has no finish line.
“They already had the bad experiences, so learn from their bad experiences and also from their good experiences — that’s my attitude in my whole life. I never say that I’m the perfect coach or my idea is the perfect idea. I will always try to reflect my idea and reflect my personality and also try to learn from others.”
Brighton’s last two games have been a microcosm of good and bad experiences for Hurzeler. At Chelsea, after taking an early lead, his team shipped four goals in the space of 20 minutes in the first half — all scored by Cole Palmer — to lose 4-2. Eight days later, the response to the only defeat so far and a 2-0 deficit at half-time against Tottenham was to score three goals in 18 second-half minutes.
“The question you always have to ask yourself at half-time is: what do you need to win the game, and what do the players need to win the game? And that’s a question I ask myself. And is it helpful to be loud at that moment? In some moments, yes, but I had the feeling (against Tottenham) that it was not the right moment to be loud or tough to them. Because in the end I thought that they needed help mentally and they needed support for their mindset, and also advice to get the turnaround in the second half.
“Half-time speeches, you just need to get the feeling for a situation. Against Chelsea it was a little bit different. It was also a little bit of a different game and that’s why the main focus is always, ‘What do we need to win the game? What change do we have to do to win the game mentally and also tactically?’”
Whether in the confines of the dressing room, or out on the training pitch, Hurzeler’s perceived handicap of lacking experience paradoxically becomes his biggest strength. “Speaking the language of the players” — his reply when asked about the advantages of being such a young head coach — makes him more relatable.
“I’m at their age, so I think we have the same needs sometimes,” he says. “We are in the same situations. Maybe we lose a girlfriend. Maybe you experience the same things because they’re the same age.”
(Top photos: Getty Images)
