Oliver Glasner: The ‘normal one’ who survived a brain haemorrhage and became a champion

Walk down Riedau’s main street from the train station, past a handful of restaurants and a car showroom, and a left turn by a supermarket brings you to a small football stadium.

This is the humble home of Austrian sixth-tier club SV Riedau, bordered on one side by an outdoor swimming pool and another by a garden centre. Behind the two-storey clubhouse flows the River Pram, a tributary of the Inn, which winds down from the Swiss Alps and eventually meets the Danube in Germany. There is one small stand but otherwise, the stadium is open to the elements, aside from the cover offered by a few trees and spindly bushes.

It is a calm, scenic spot, with rolling hills and farmland stretching to the horizon, but there is little reason for visitors to venture to this northern corner of Austria, not far from the borders with Germany and the Czech Republic. It is certainly not the sort of place you might expect to produce a football manager working in the most lucrative and highest-profile league in the world.

Yet this is where Oliver Glasner, the Premier League’s latest managerial import, calls home.

The “best German-speaking coach after Jurgen Klopp”, as one long-term associate calls him, still regularly returns to Riedau despite a career that has seen him win a major European trophy — the 2021-22 Europa League with Germany’s Eintracht Frankfurt — and become only the second Austrian to manage in England’s top flight after former Southampton boss Ralph Hasenhuttl, having joined Crystal Palace in February.

So much of the Glasner story is improbable — from his origins in Riedau, to surviving a brain haemorrhage that left doctors fearing for his life and ended his playing career, to his coaching successes in Austria and then Germany. But to those who have known him longest, none of it has been surprising.

Through it all, it seems Glasner has remained unchanged: grounded and loyal to his friends and family, and keen to maintain his connection to this part of Austria which helped shape him.

Written on a board at the Allianz-Pramtal Arena is a list of benefactors who have helped sustain SV Riedau. In the top left corner, in small black lettering, are the names of Oliver Glasner and his wife, Bettina.

It is a testament to Glasner’s affection for the club where his football journey began as an eight-year-old, and the village where he still retains a modest family home. The Allianz-Pramtal clubhouse was rebuilt in 2013, long after their most famous export had departed for nearby SV Ried, currently of the domestic second division, but little else has changed.

The same is true of Glasner, who still returns to this ground to watch his sons Julian, 22, a midfielder, and Niklas, 19, a striker, play for SV Riedau.

It feels like everyone in the village knows the family — the population is around 2,000, 250 of whom regularly turn out to watch SV Riedau’s home games — and the message is unanimous: success has not changed Oliver.

“I’ve known him since he was 10,” says Markus Hansbauer, Riedau’s mayor. “I played against him. He was a very good, fair player. And 40 years later, nothing has changed. When he’s in Riedau and they have a game, he watches the game; when they don’t, he visits family and friends, plays golf, tennis. It’s clear the job is important but when he has time, he goes home.”

There is little drama to be found in Glasner’s early years here. Roland Hofpointer, who has known him since they started playing together as children and is now coach of Riedau, remembers an accident when the young Glasner fell backwards in the garden at home and “cracked his skull” on the ground, but in general, the picture painted is of a contented boy who loved football.

“He was a very good player for our level — better than the rest of our kids,” Hofpointer says. “He was the best player with his technique and very fast in his head. He always knew what the opposition players wanted to do.

“He was 15 when he started to play in our first team and at this time we didn’t play with four defenders, we played with a libero and he was in that position. I played with him as a defender and we were very successful. We had one game when there were over 1,000 supporters.

“Today it’s easy to say this, but we always knew he would be a great player or a great coach. He was really special. And now, when he comes to the ground and sees the supporters, he always talks with everyone. He’s tough in his job but always kind.”

Ten miles (16km) south west of Riedau is Ried im Innkreis — a bigger town of 12,000 residents.

A few minutes walk from the centre, with its array of shops and cafes in subtle pastel shades, lies the Innviertel Arena. Graffiti bearing the mark of the ‘Glory Boys’ ultras group is daubed on the walls outside, complete with the image of a fan whose face is covered by a scarf.

SV Ried’s home is tiny by the standards of most Premier League grounds — its capacity is 7,300, and on a good day it only gets half-full — but this is where Glasner began to expand his football horizons, moving here from SV Riedau as a 17-year-old and going on to make over 500 appearances for the club, earning hero status.

SV Ried, where Glasner spent the vast majority of his playing career (Matt Woosnam/The Athletic)

Klaus Roitinger, the club’s most successful coach and the man who gave Glasner his debut in 1992, remembers a precocious talent who always seemed a step ahead of his peers.

“I heard that a young player, aged 17, was a leader of the team and it was incredible for me,” Roitinger says. “I followed a game and the players were much older than him but when he spoke they followed him. After the game, I went to him and I was so impressed. I said, ‘You must come to our team’.

“He was mature — he had an exam in Scharding (a town 20 miles north of Ried, where Glasner attended secondary school) and he said, ‘Yes I will come after my exam’.

“He played in midfield at first, but in different positions. He was first on the right side but it was a little problem as he’s not the fastest player” — Roitinger laughs at the memory — “but then he played as a holding No 6 and three years later as a ‘libero’.”

Glasner’s leadership and natural curiosity, features of his management, always stood out.

“He was, from the first day, interested in tactics,” Roitinger says. “He always asked me, ‘Is this the right way?’. I knew I must always think when I speak with Oliver because he has good ideas. He was like wine, the older the better.”

Rainer Wollinger, SV Ried’s managing director, agrees. “He developed into the head and the brain of the team. Oliver was the one who passed on the messages from the coach — he was the captain and the translator.”

After Roitinger left the club at the end of the 1998-99 season, Glasner acted as the de facto manager.

“The new coach explained the standards, but Oliver thought they didn’t understand and so he explained to his team-mates what to do,” Wollinger says. “He was always getting bigger and bigger (in importance), because he had so much insight. Sometimes there are groups (in squads) but Oliver made one group from three, all together. He was a leader.”

Rudi Zauner, left, and Xandi Mitterhofer worked with Glasner at SV Ried (Matt Woosnam/The Athletic)

So when did they realise he would go into coaching? “When he was 20,” Roitinger says. “We often spoke about what we can make better. He came to me and said, ‘What can we do?’. I told him, ‘Go home!’. But he was interested. He understands football. In his brain, he knows, ‘I must play so and so’, and he knows if the players have it in their brain then success will happen.

“He’s not arrogant, he has empathy. It’s not a role he plays. It’s not the money, either. The players feel that it’s true. He has time for everyone, from the kit manager to the cleaner.”

One moment in particular stands out for Roitinger when it comes to illustrating Glasner’s strength of character.

It was May 1998 and SV Ried, then in the top domestic division, had reached the Austrian Cup final — a milestone moment for a club who had never before won a major trophy. However, a month before the game, Glasner — by now a cornerstone of the team — had an operation to remove his appendix, making him a serious doubt for the final.

“I said, ‘Oliver, it’s a disaster. In a month we have the most important game in the club’s history’,” Roitinger recalls. “Oliver said to me, ‘Trainer, I will play’.”

Glasner did just that, coming on as a second-half substitute as SV Ried beat Sturm Graz 3-1.

From left: Zauner, Mitterhofer, Klaus Roitinger and Christian Wollinger in front of a photo of Glasner lifting the Austrian Cup at SV Ried (Matt Woosnam/The Athletic)

In July 2011, as Glasner’s playing career was beginning to draw to a close, SV Ried were playing an early-season Bundesliga away match against Rapid Vienna when he clashed heads with an opponent, giving him a concussion.

Although he had to go off, Glasner was deemed fit enough to travel to Denmark a few days later for the second leg of a Europa League qualifying phase tie against Brondby, and he completed a heading drill with assistant coach Michael Angerschmid, who is now on his staff at Palace, the evening before the game.

The following day, Glasner told his room-mate, the goalkeeper Thomas Gebauer, he had a headache and would not be joining the squad for lunch. When the normally punctual Glasner failed to show up for a pre-match training session that afternoon, defender Rudolf Zauner expressed concerns and went to his room to check on him. He found Glasner sprawled on the floor of his shower, still conscious, and immediately called for the club’s doctor, who rang for an ambulance.

Glasner was taken to a hospital in Copenhagen, where he was diagnosed with a brain haemorrhage and had surgery the same day.

SV Ried’s players remained unaware of the seriousness of Glasner’s condition, with manager Paul Gludovatz opting not to tell them before the game that evening. It was only afterwards — they lost 4-2 but went through on the now scrapped away-goals rule having won the first leg 2-0 — that they were informed.

“We were sitting at the bar in the hotel, waiting for the doctor who was there at the operation,” says Xandi Mitterhofer, SV Ried’s director of finance who has worked for the club since 1996. “At 2am, he said all went well, the operation was successful. We said, ‘OK we win but we can’t celebrate’.”

Glasner stayed in hospital for a week, with Bettina flying in to be at his bedside. Even though the operation was successful, it was clear his playing career was over at 36.

“He had to learn to speak and walk again,” Mitterhofer says. “Every day, he wanted to train his brain. Because he was so focused on himself, the healing process was fast. Other people have to stay longer in hospital or have therapy or they cannot do a job like he did, because he had to think about the brain and use his brain very hard. He never gave up.

Glasner’s playing career was ended by his brain injury (Mathias Kniepeiss/Getty Images)

“It was a hard thing that he knew he couldn’t play football. But he knew he could use his second chance and he wanted to be a coach. He’s a very strong person. When he went one step back, he knew he could go two steps forward again.”

Mitterhofer says Glasner was not changed by the accident. Instead, he was determined not to dwell on his misfortune. “It’s like, ‘I had this but it’s over and the focus is on the future, not the past’,” she says.

It tallies with Glasner’s own remarks about the injury.

Asked this month whether the incident had changed anything for him, he replied: “I don’t think about it every day. We know there are many car accidents every day, but when you drive in the car you never think, ‘I hope I don’t have an accident’. I try to be positive because then life is easier and better. I was a humble person before and I am now.”

Does Mitterhofer agree? “Yes.”

Football is not everything for Glasner, even if he has dedicated so much of his life to it. His family come first, then his friends, but there are other interests away from the game.

Coaching was never a guaranteed career. Glasner completed a Business Administration degree while still playing and his first job after retiring as a player, in January 2012, was in an administrative role, as assistant to Austrian club Red Bull Salzburg’s chief executive.

“It was for life safety,” laughs Roman Luksch, SV Riedau’s president. “If football doesn’t become real, he always has a second plan.”

“He always said there are only 12 jobs as a coach in Austria (the number of clubs in its top division), so you have to make another job,” adds Hofpointer.

Glasner was offered a route into coaching as Roger Schmidt’s assistant at Salzburg. Then, two years later, he took his first manager’s job back at SV Ried.

He did not enjoy immediate success. “Oliver won once in the first 10 games as coach,” says Zauner. “We talked about it on the team bus. I told him he had to change something and told him my slogan. It’s N.I.P.S.I.E.L.D (an acronym in German) — it means, ‘Don’t think in problems, think in solutions’. Oliver now uses that.”

Even in the relatively rustic surrounds of SV Ried, Glasner’s ambitions were evident.

“We once had a meeting here,” Mitterhofer says, gesturing around the small conference room in the stadium’s main stand where we are talking. “Oliver wanted to present, to the president and the head of the club, the system he wanted to do. He showed the team on this TV — how fast a player can run, how many kilometres he had covered, the system he wanted to play.

“They all heard it and thought, ‘What is this?’. This club does not have the possibility to give him this because it costs a lot of money, so they decided Oliver can make the next step.”

That ambition led Glasner to join LASK, SV Ried’s arch-rivals from Linz, Austria’s third largest city, in 2015.

Glasner had played, very briefly, for LASK on loan after SV Ried were relegated in 2003 — he ruptured an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in his knee on debut and only made three total appearances that season — but this was still a controversial move. “Ried and LASK fans hate each other. He went to the enemy,” says Wollinger.

Oliver Glasner chats to LASK fans in 2019 (Guenther Iby/SEPA.Media /Getty Images)

He enjoyed enough success during his four years at LASK, promotion to the top flight and then qualifying for Europe twice, to persuade Wolfsburg to give him his chance in the German Bundesliga in the summer of 2019. While a small hardcore of fans still harbour resentment over the move to their rivals, most SV Ried fans have forgiven him and he was welcomed back by the club two years ago for a Christmas celebration.

It fits with Glasner’s progressive but pragmatic streak as a coach — someone utterly committed to his principles, even if he is prepared to make small adaptations when necessary.

“The plan is important,” says Luksch. “He’s not a coach who plans for one year, it’s important to see what the future is for the club.”

Back home in Riedau, there is overwhelming pride in Glasner’s success, but no shock that someone from such a modest place has ended up in the Premier League.

Glasner’s enduring strong bond with Riedau saw him return a fortnight ago after taking the Palace side he had just inherited from Roy Hodgson to the Spanish resort of Marbella for a mid-season training break, and he got to watch his sons play for his old club in a 3-0 away victory.

He takes a keen interest in his boys’ careers, but is not overbearing, leaving Julian and Niklas to forge their own paths. He has stressed to them — as he has with young players throughout his coaching career — the importance of taking education seriously and having the right attitude.

Hansbauer and Hofpointer have fond memories of Glasner at SV Riedau (Matt Woosnam/The Athletic)

Glasner takes his work seriously, but he does have a lighter side.

Mitterhofer remembers how he would join the SV Ried squad in their preferred nightclub in the town centre to celebrate a victory with Norwegian pop star Wencke Myhre’s 1970 song Er Hat Ein Knallrotes Gummiboot (‘He Has A Bright Red Rubberboat’).

“The song came on, and they would all sit on the floor and do this” — she mimics a rowing action — “Every time, when they partied and heard the song, they always did this.”

Mitterhofer’s affection for Glasner is still obvious, just as it is with all his old friends. All speak of his determination, ambition and intellectual rigour, but also of his kindness and ability to connect with people. His success has not come without its trials, but Glasner has realised his ambitions without losing touch with his roots.

“He’s a normal one, like Jurgen Klopp,” Roitinger says. “But besides Klopp, he’s the best German-speaking coach in the world — and I know all coaches and managers from Germany and Austria. He’s not always had sunny days, but his career is a wonder.”

(Top photos: Getty Images)