Before his Brighton team continued their strong start to the season (5th) with a 1-0 win at Newcastle, the youngest manager in Premier League history, Fabian Hurzeler, opened up to The Guardian. The former Sankt-Pauli coach, whom we met to discuss his approach, shared an experience that greatly shaped him as a manager: selling paintings for an art dealer in Munich in 2016. At 23, the Houston native decided to end his professional playing career to coach FC Pipinsried, a fifth-division club. At the same time, he sold paintings to make a living, drawing a crucial lesson from this experience: “If you want to sell something to a client, you have to try to convince them. You can’t just say, ‘Look, it’s an amazing painting by an amazing artist, blah, blah, blah.’ It’s the same for a coach,” explained Roberto De Zerbi’s successor. “The most important thing is to understand the person hidden behind the player. What are their needs? What are their values? What is their background? Where were they educated?”
Hurzeler, paintings, and players
Brief