Fabian Hurzeler, Premier League’s youngest ever manager at 31, loves setpieces and high-presses

Five of Brighton’s starters against Everton were older than their manager, Fabian Hurzeler. His managerial counterpart, Sean Dyche, 53, was already a grisly centre-back at Chesterfield when Hurzeler was born in Houston, to dentist parents. Hurzeler, 31, is the youngest permanent manager in the history of English Premier League, its prevailing avatar the same age as him. Fresh-faced, with a faint stubble and a placid smile, liberally tattooed arms that fiddle with his cap, he looks younger, like an obscure substitute or a nutritionist, who had accidentally wandered into the touchline

There, though, was hardly a wave of surprise when Brighton & Hove Albion employed him as the manager. His reputation preceded him. Last year, he steered St Pauli, a left-leaning club with the insignia of a skull in northern Hamburg that he joined as assistant coach in 2020 when it was in the second division and had just bottled a promotion opportunity, to the Bundesliga for the first-ever time. His journey to St Pauli was even more fascinating.

Hurzeler was only two years old when his parents—father is Swiss and mother German—quit practice in the States and settled in Freiburg, before moving to Munich. In the city of the country’s most decorated football clubs, football captivated him and by 10, he was already at the Bayern Munich academy, nursing football ambitions. “A hardworking midfielder,” by his own accounts, he spent the next 10 years warming the age-group benches of several clubs including Bayern, Hoffenheim and 1860 Munich, before “common sense prevailed and I stopped dreaming that I could be a professional.”

Brighton & Hove Albion manager Fabian Hurzeler reacts. (Reuters)

At the age of 23, he took his first leap into managing, joining fifth-division club FC Pipinsried as player-coach. That’s why Hurzeler insists that he has more experience in managing teams than several others that are older than him. “My age is a big topic, I know that. I say I am a young man, but I am not a young coach,” he would say in his unveiling press conference.

His ideas on the pitch, as illustrated in the thrashing of Everton are well-defined. Brighton was dynamic and energetic, pressed high and aggressively, commanding possession, dictating tempo, and regaining possession as soon as it was lost, emitting the vibes of Jurgen Klopp in his Dortmund years. The midfield shape-shifts, often assuming the form of an elongated diamond, the attacking midfielders often interchanged their roles, and maddeningly kept the ball higher up the pitch. He used to stick a poster in the St Pauli dressing room: “Always on the front foot.” Like his Brighton predecessor Roberto de Zerbi, he builds from the back, but the build-up play is not as elaborate as the Italian’s either. Besides, he has a maniacal obsession with set-pieces, unlike de Zerbi. “I’m a big fan of set pieces because set pieces are a game-changer. They are a match-winner. This would be part of my identity,” he said.

In the technical area, he is all fire and brimstone, preening and pirouetting, yelling instructions, encouraging them, moving to and fro corresponding to his team’s movements. Last year, he received seven yellow cards. It’s easy to foresee him copping a few this year too. Not that it would bother him. “I didn’t receive a yellow card yet in the Premier League! I will be authentic and I won’t change, but also I will always be respectful,” said Hurzeler, who considers Marcelo Bielsa and Pep Guardiola as his “coaching voice”.

In the dressing room, he has emphasised on “being the best team-mate.”

Brighton & Hove Albion manager Fabian Hurzeler reacts. (Reuters)

“This brings energy. This brings a relationship to each other. This makes you strong on the pitch. This is togetherness. So, a big save from the goalkeeper; cheer, support. You have to live it and that’s what we need to be successful. So, positivity and being the best team-mate. Two very important values,” he told his players in his first speech.

His vision, he says, is to create a family. Before officially joining the club, he learned the names of every non-football staff at the club in England’s south coast and met them addressing their names. He brought them cookies and candies when introducing himself to them.

Training sessions, though. are intense and draining. During the preseason to Japan, he made them practise under the oppressive 1 pm sun in front of a packed stand. “Really hard, but it’s been really enjoyable as well. If you put the hard work in, you get your rewards from it – which is what you want as players,” Brighton veteran Adam Webster would say. To mix fun, he has introduced hand tennis, two against one, in narrow spaces.

In weeks, he has woven a strong bond with his players. So much so that some of them, like the first-choice goalkeeper Jason Steele, two years older than Hurzeler, told his wife after the first day’s practice that he was overwhelmed. “I told her there is no way I am older than the boss, which is credit to him. To be able to capture the room and have that aura and charisma. The moment he took his first meeting it was, ‘Wow, this guy is here and he is ready’. Everything about him screams boss and that is the biggest compliment I can give him.”

The commitment of the players, the trust in his methods and the respect he exudes were writ large in the hammering of Everton, though sterner tests await them. Seven of his next nine games are those against the teams that finished in the top eight last season. But the first impressions of the Premier League’s youngest ever manager suggests that the latest punt of Brighton’s owner Tony Bloom, a betting entrepreneur, is a calculated gamble.

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