Walk down Rideau’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 Rideau, bordered on one side by an outdoor swimming pool and another by a garden center. 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 Rideaus 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 topflight after former Southampton boss Ralph Whisenhunt, having joined Crystal Palace in February.
So much of the Glasner story is improbable — from his origins in Rideau, to surviving a brain hemorrhaged that left doctor 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.
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