Soccer (Football)
Marcel Sabitzer just wants to win
Love, ambition, and brutal honesty: how 26-year-old Marcel Sabitzer has been instrumental in RB Leipzig’s success...and grown as a person in the process.
As we moved into the most exciting ten minutes of the entire group phase of the Champions League at Leipzig’s Red Bull Arena, Marcel Sabitzer reached into his mental bag of tricks.
His team had just conceded their second goal against Manchester United in three minutes, and RB Leipzig’s 3:0 lead had been pegged back to 3:2. Another goal for the visitors and they’d be out and in potentially the most nightmarish of ways. There were eight minutes left to play plus stoppage time.
“Stay smart, stay calm,” Sabitzer reassured his team. “This is about holding our nerve now.”
He used a simple but effective train of thought to make sure he stuck to his own advice. “I put myself in their shoes,” he remembers. “You’ve got to score and there are only a few minutes left to play. That’s incredibly difficult if your opponents – us, in this case – are playing tight, smart football.”
No stress: Marcel Sabitzer has found greater serenity since becoming a dad
© Norman Konrad
Stay smart, stay calm. It’s about holding our nerve now
As it transpired, it was too difficult for United that night. The ref blew the whistle after 94 minutes. RB Leipzig were in the last 16 of the Champions League and Marcel Sabitzer - instrumental in two of the three Leipzig goals, who led the way from midfield, helped motivate the team, got stuck in when needed and kept his cool in those final minutes - had shown once again just how important both his playing class and mental strength were for the team.
In his sixth year with RB Leipzig, Marcel Sabitzer, 26, has become a leading player in a team that by reaching the Champions League semis in the summer of 2020 were now part of the European elite. By qualifying to play Liverpool in the last 16 this year, RB Leipzig have also shown they’re there to stay.
For the team, it is the latest highlight in a unique success story. In 2009 they joined the Oberliga, the fifth tier of the German league. By 2016 they’d already been promoted to the Bundesliga and in 2019 they made it to the final of the DFB-Pokal, the German Cup. Sabitzer just thinks of these achievements as the preliminary results of developments which their manager, Julian Nagelsmann, calls outstanding and which, as many experts agree, are far from over.
Honest criticism is the only thing that helps you improve
A 90-minute match every third day is no skin off Marcel Sabitzer’s nose
© Norman Konrad
There are football careers that take off suddenly. There are others that develop in waves. If we were to plot Marcel Sabitzer’s career, it would be an almost continuous line rising to the top-right hand side of the graph. And there’s no knowing where things will end. But it is clear how this has happened. It is based on a mix of traits which don’t guarantee success but do make it likely. And not just in the world of football.
My daughter gives me new perspectives on my life
Whenever you talk to people who know Marcel Sabitzer well, there’s one thing they almost always say: he’s incredibly ambitious. Sabitzer says the same thing. But he puts a different, more positive, spin on it. “I’ve always been the winning kind.”
Sabitzer, who was nicknamed Sabi even back in childhood, grew up in the state of Upper Austria. He was born to a famous father, Herfried Sabitzer, another Sabi, a star forward who won six caps with the Austrian national team. That came with advantages and disadvantages. He inherited his father’s talent and became acquainted with the professional world of sport at an early age, but it meant moving home every time his father changed clubs and he also had to deal with high expectations whenever he stepped onto the pitch.
Sabitzer is consistent as his performance improves season by season
© Norman Konrad
When he was seven he joined the GAK youth academy in Graz. He was quickly moved up a year and captained the team there. “He wasn’t the biggest or toughest physically but he had great technique, already had a great shot on him and always went out there with total self-confidence and commitment,” says Reinhard Holzschuster, one of the GAK youth coaches. There was just one thing Sabi wasn’t any good at back then, and that was losing. “Even losing in practice was almost physically painful for him,” says Holzschuster.
Sabi knew from an early age the route his path should take. The whippersnapper of 13 confidently told a TV reporter after winning the Austrian school championship that he hoped to be playing in the Austrian Bundesliga in a couple of years’ time, “...and that I’ll get to play abroad”.
The fact that he did that via Admira Wacker (where he made his professional debut at 16), Rapid Vienna (where he became a key player) and RB Salzburg (where he won the league and cup double in 2015) is partly down to his recognising one thing early. “I had to learn to accept others’ advice, even when I didn’t like it. There was a while there when I was 16, 17 where I thought that I’d already done it all and was getting it all right. And I hadn’t achieved anything at that point. You only get better by taking constructive criticism on board," he says.
Sabitzer didn’t actually want to be at Leipzig when he arrived there in 2015. He had just dominated the Austrian top flight with Salzburg. With RB Leipzig, who he was signed to – he was only on loan to Salzburg – he’d be playing teams from places like Fürth and Sandhausen.
“I can’t be as good as I thought I was or I wouldn’t be playing in the second Bundesliga in Germany,” he said and didn’t seem all that happy. Barely a year later, he was laughing in the jacuzzi with his teammates, celebrating their promotion to the top flight and probably already thinking then what he says over and over now. “Looking back, moving to Leipzig was the right decision.”
I opened my last packet of crisps five years ago
What you notice right from the off is that Sabitzer is always there for RB Leipzig. Second division, first division, Champions League...the team makes the ascent from one level to the next and Sabitzer is always there, always playing his part. His understanding of the game and tackling skills drove his opponents mad; his speed and excellent passing made space for his teammates. And as for his shots, they haven’t got any worse since his youth. In Leipzig he has become a leading player. In Austria he was voted footballer of the year in 2017, ahead of his friend and multiple winner, David Alaba.
A year and a half later, in the summer of 2019, Sabitzer was at the training camp in Tyrol with Julian Nagelsmann. It was his first one-on-one conversation with his new coach. They spoke for about 20 minutes, by which point Sabitzer knew that they had good chemistry and the coach was relying on him. Nagelsmann first put him up front, where he was used to playing, but in early 2020 he started playing him in a defensive midfield role. And then he made him captain.
As captain, Sabitzer has learnt that different players have different needs
© Norman Konrad
Nagelsmann is particularly taken with Sabitzer’s hunger, tactical brain and consistency. “His level is constant with periods of brilliance,” the coach says. “He is of fundamental importance because he always performs well and is utterly stable.”
How does Sabitzer do it? Through discipline and hard work. “My body is my capital,” he says, and so he takes care of it accordingly. He sleeps well (and tries to be in bed by 10pm), eats well (he last opened a packet of crisps five years ago), and recovers well. “It’s no skin off my nose to play 90 minutes every third day,” he says, “as long as I stick to my rhythm.”
Another thing he’s just fine with: pressure in crunch matches. If it’s true that the sign of a great player is that they play well in big games, Marcel Sabitzer has a very promising future ahead of him. He scored in RB Leipzig’s second division debut, he scored in their first division debut, he scored a dream goal in an important Champions League match against Zenit St. Petersburg, scored twice in the last 16 against Tottenham in 2020 and laid on the winning goal in the quarter-final against Atlético Madrid.
"Sabi is there when it matters,” says his friend and fellow midfielder Konrad Laimer. “And he does an awful lot to make the team perform to its best ability.” He urges the others on, sometimes with the right play, at others with the right attitude.
I can tell the truth to everyone on the team
If ever you interview Marcel Sabitzer, you’ll find someone who’s quick-witted, sharp and sometimes willing to go on the offensive. “Does my role as captain give me wings? Such a journalist question... I don’t have an answer," he replies.
Sabitzer doesn’t seem like the kind of guy you’d sit around in a cafe chatting to about nothing for three hours, more like the type who’d turn up for 15 minutes but talk about all the important stuff. In talking to him you sense the same straightforwardness that marks his game and leadership style. As a footballer he has all the tools but he only uses the ones he needs at any given moment. If he back-heels the ball, it’s not for the applause but because it’s the right thing to do at the time.
The same applies to his captaincy. “I’m not constantly barking out orders,” he says. “I often stay quiet, sit back and observe a lot. But I step in if someone needs a push or has to be told to calm down.”
I'm calm, and I watch a lot
When some of the players were in trouble with the manager in 2018 for seeming too focused on their mobile phones and not the match ahead of an important game, Sabitzer tackled things head on with a couple of his mates within the team. He said his piece and then the air was clear. “I can tell anyone in the team the truth to their face and would want it to be the same the other way round,” says Sabitzer. “Honesty is the absolute priority for me.”
“I often stay quiet and I observe a lot," says Sabizter
© Norman Konrad
But he is more diplomatic now than he used to be. “In the early days, I couldn’t bear it if I felt a teammate wasn’t just as committed as I was. I often let that out verbally and clashed with other players. I would think, ‘Erm, so I go to bed at 10pm and he goes to bed at 2am. Doesn’t he take the job seriously?’ Now I know that every footballer is an individual and needs different things to be able to perform at his best," he says.
Family is hugely important to Sabitzer. He’s been with his girlfriend – and now fiancée - Katja Kühne since 2017 and he became a father in April 2019. “I think his private set-up is a significant part of why he’s made even greater progress recently,” says Austrian U21 manager Werner Gregoritsch, who’s known the Sabitzer family well for years.
Our midfield star thinks the same thing himself. The birth of his daughter has made him more content and serene. “A child gives you a different perspective on life and certain situations,” he says. “I’m just happy to have such a beautiful family life. And I’ve learnt to deal with moments of stress better. If you want to convey calm to your child, it’ll only work if you exude calm yourself, not if you’re loud.”
Is there a danger that his hunger on the pitch will abate now that there’s so much harmony at home? Not a chance. “When I eventually stop playing football, I want to be able to look back on an utterly brilliant career with great clubs and huge success to my name,” he says. “Whether I achieve that or not is partly up to me and partly isn’t. So I’ll focus on the thing I can affect: my performance.”
RB Leipzig play Liverpool in the Champions League Round of 16 on February 16 and March 10. For more information, go to dierotenbullen.com
