Marc Kosicke: Jürgen Klopp's Strategic Assistant at DFB
Jürgen Klopp did not walk into the DFB alone. He brought the man who has been at his side for almost 20 years, the quiet strategist who helped shape modern German football from the shadows: Marc Kosicke.
At his official unveiling on Friday, Klopp confirmed that Kosicke will become “my assistant coach for strategy, development and innovation” with the national team. For Kosicke, that means a clean break from his previous life. He has already stepped down as managing director of his company Projekt Five and ended his advisory work for other coaches. All chips are now on Klopp and the DFB.
Klopp made it clear this is not a cosmetic hire.
“It is not enough for only a head coach to come in,” he said. “We have to change a great many things. We want to turn over every stone.”
Those stones are exactly what Kosicke has built a career on. Long before he followed Klopp from Mainz to Dortmund and into the elite coaching circles of Europe, he had already carved out a unique role in German football. He is widely regarded as the “inventor” of the coach adviser, a specialist who shapes careers, brands and long-term strategy for managers rather than players. Until 2021, he worked closely with Julian Nagelsmann, helping steer one of the most talked-about coaching careers of the last decade.
Yet Kosicke’s influence stretches well beyond the dugout. A Bremen-born, self-confessed Werder fan, he once played a decisive role at Bayern Munich of all places, turning a regional saying into one of world football’s most powerful identity slogans.
The Werder fan who bottled Bayern’s soul
The story sounds almost too neat to be true, but Kosicke has told it himself. In 2008, he was on a flight to a FIFA event in Switzerland with his then business partner Oliver Bierhoff. On the same plane: Uli Hoeneß, grumbling.
Hoeneß complained about his own players and the fact that nobody really knew what Bayern Munich stood for anymore. The club was winning, but its identity felt blurred. Kosicke asked him directly what Bayern represented. Hoeneß, he recalls, did not have a clear answer.
That was the opening.
Kosicke told him about his years at Nike and Adidas, about the “company bibles” those giants used to drill values and messages into every employee. Hoeneß listened, then asked whether he could create something similar for Bayern.
“With 100 per cent cluelessness but a lot of self-confidence,” as he later put it, Kosicke agreed. Hoeneß made one thing clear: he wanted Kosicke himself, not a polished consultancy crew “in ties” turning up with slide decks and buzzwords.
So Kosicke assembled a deliberately mixed working group inside the club. People from the fan shop. Marketing staff. The kit man. The youth coordinator. Media chief Stefan Mennerich. Chief scout Wolfgang Dremmler. For four weeks they sat together and worked on the question Hoeneß had struggled to answer on that plane: what exactly is Bayern Munich?
The pressure finally told in the form of 16 “commandments” – core values that would underpin everything. “We are a family and stand by one another.” “We do not communicate about one another in public.” Simple sentences, but a clear framework for behaviour from the academy to the boardroom.
The slogan, though, had been fixed in Kosicke’s mind from the start. He already had it during that first conversation with Hoeneß, but kept it to himself until the right moment. The working group helped him build the values around it. The phrase that would go on the cover had long been chosen: “Mia san mia”.
Lederhosen leather and a Bavarian misstep
For the presentation to the Bayern board, Kosicke went for symbolism. He had a few prototype copies of the new club bible bound in real lederhosen leather. This was Bayern, after all: tradition, self-belief, a touch of theatre.
When he unveiled the title, the reaction in the room was immediate. Delight. Laughter. Recognition. Hoeneß loved the slogan, with one pointed correction. “Great slogan, but this MIR is a space station,” he said.
On the cover, the phrase read “Mir san mir”, not “Mia san mia”. The Bremen native had stumbled over the finer points of Bavarian dialect. It was the only thing that needed changing.
Alongside the bible, Kosicke produced a roadmap for how Bayern should implement the values throughout the club. After that, his job was done. When he sent his invoice, he also formally assigned his rights to the slogan and added a promise: as someone from Bremen and adviser to Jürgen Klopp, he would not go around presenting himself as the great inventor of “Mia san mia”.
The plan inside Bayern was clear. Every new arrival, from an office employee to a youth player from Fürstenfeldbruck or a star signing like Sadio Mané, would receive this bible as part of their onboarding. The message was blunt: this is who we are, these are the values we live by.
That a Werder fan helped Bayern bottle their identity remains one of the small ironies of German football. That the same man now steps into a central strategic role at the DFB alongside Klopp is something else entirely.
Kosicke has spent two decades shaping others’ messages and mentalities. Now he and Klopp will try to do the same for a national team searching, again, for its own clear sense of self.
