Oliver Glasner puffs out his cheeks and searches for the right words as he contemplates going back to Crystal Palace. On Sunday he returns to Selhurst Park for the first time since leaving the club, this time in the Nottingham Forest dugout, and he knows the occasion carries more than the usual weight of a reunion.
Bitterness between the two clubs runs deep, largely because Forest seized Palace’s place in the Europa League last season. Forest’s owner, Evangelos Marinakis, is suing Palace for defamation over a banner unfurled by their supporters, and the rivalry was heightened further when Glasner joined Forest in the summer, 40 days after winning the Conference League with Palace.
Speaking in the boardroom at Forest’s training base, Glasner reached for Goethe’s Faust to explain his position. “Two hearts are beating in my chest,” he said, tapping his torso, before adding: “Here is a little bit similar, because we had a little bit more than two great years [at Palace].” He is, by any measure, an unusual figure in a Premier League dugout: a charismatic and intelligent man who studied for an economics degree while playing in Austria.
The record he left behind explains why the return is loaded. Glasner led Palace to their first major trophies, following an FA Cup win at Wembley last year by clinching the Conference League in Leipzig in May, and adding the Community Shield for the first time. Palace were sent into the Conference League in the first place after Forest complained to Uefa about a breach of its multi-club ownership rules. Palace’s chair, Steve Parish, has said he would be mortified if Glasner received anything other than a hero’s welcome — and Glasner is hoping the supporters dwell on the good times rather than the manner of his exit. “They should look back at the emotions they had when they attended the final at Wembley, when they attended the final in Leipzig, when they watched the Community Shield,” he said.
He is keen to set out the timeline of how he ended up at the City Ground. “It was not a decision against Crystal Palace, because I decided last October, one year ago, not to sign a new contract. It was then, in the summer, a decision for Nottingham Forest, due to different reasons,” he said. “Sometimes unexpected things happen in life … there was no plan for me to be Forest manager.” Glasner remains in touch with Parish and has visited him in London, but he will not apologise for speaking his mind. He points to February, when he told Palace supporters to “stay humble” after some had chanted for him to be sacked during a run of one win in 15 matches, a sequence that also included an FA Cup exit at the hands of the part-timers Macclesfield. “I will never say what everybody wants to hear, I will say it if I think it’s right. And then I have to accept the booing,” he said. “I’m now 52, I don’t need to ask everyone if it’s fine what I’m doing … as long as it’s aligned with the law.”
Slow starts, he points out, are nothing new. At Palace he won none of his opening eight league games; at Eintracht Frankfurt he won none of his first eight matches and finished that season by lifting the Europa League trophy in Seville. When he met Marinakis in Athens, discussing the job over a seafood platter in Vouliagmeni, he warned the Greek owner that there was no quick fix for a squad that had cycled through four managers and finished 16th the previous season. “I said: ‘If you expect everything to work within one month, I’m the wrong one, take another one,'” Glasner recalled. Three months into a three-year contract, he believes matters are moving in the right direction. “I feel the messages we are delivering to the players, the things we are demanding are getting more and more natural.”
The international break gave Forest room to breathe after a disappointing start. A week on from victory at Aston Villa, they crashed to defeat at home to a previously pointless Coventry. “It’s always in these situations [that] the season is decided,” Glasner said. “In these situations, after losing against Coventry, it’s important how you react. Not on the pitch, but how you react in the club, in the team, all together. Do you stay together? Do you blame each other?” Forest travel to Selhurst Park with one win and two draws from their five league games, having experimented with a four-man defence in a friendly win over Swansea last weekend.
His enthusiasm for the job is audible. Glasner was on holiday with his wife, Bettina, at the serene Austrian lakes when Forest’s interest intensified. “She said: ‘Why are you always looking at your phone?’ [I said:] ‘I’m going to Athens tomorrow.’ She said: ‘Are you crazy? We are here on vacation,'” he said. “There were many, many different options in the summer. The one I thought I would do is staying at home, which is why my family was not really pleased with my early decision to leave again … but in that moment when I looked in detail, into the squad, and gathered my thoughts, I started to get butterflies.” A former Frankfurt manager who keeps a picture in his home office of himself on the balcony of the Frankfurt Römer town hall with 50,000 fans behind him, he measures a job by its potential rather than its glamour. “When I’m considering a club, it’s not just about winning the Premier League,” he said.
Last week he welcomed grassroots coaches and schoolchildren to training, taking part in a Q&A and running a 45-minute session for the children. Life in the East Midlands has its own rewards. “The biggest difference compared to London is that everybody seems to know me,” Glasner said. “Whereas in London you can be quite anonymous; I always took the tube and then maybe there were two or three [supporters who recognised me]. But here everybody recognises me and they want to have a few photos.” He has also thrown himself into the squad’s fiercely contested recovery sessions, an in-house padel tournament in which Nikola Milenkovic and Nicolás Domínguez beat Glasner and his assistant, Michael Angerschmid, in the final. “I was disappointed that I lost,” he said, smiling. “But Milenkovic and especially Domínguez, an Argentinian, were too good.” On Sunday afternoon at Selhurst Park, there will be no such invisibility cloak.