Marc Kosicke: Shaping Football Identity with Jürgen Klopp

Jürgen Klopp did not walk into the DFB alone. He brought the man who has quietly shaped some of modern football’s most powerful identities.

Marc Kosicke, long known as Klopp’s right-hand man, has been formally installed as “assistant coach for strategy, development and innovation” with the German national team. To take up the role, he has already stepped down as managing director of his company Projekt Five and ended his advisory work for other coaches. The partnership with Klopp, which has lasted around two decades, now moves onto the international stage.

Klopp made it clear at his unveiling that this is no cosmetic appointment.

“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.”

Kosicke will be central to that upheaval. He is widely regarded as the “inventor” of the coach adviser, having worked closely with leading figures such as Julian Nagelsmann until 2021, and he has long operated in the space where football, branding and identity meet.

Nowhere is that more evident than in his unlikely role in codifying Bayern Munich’s “Mia san mia” era.

A Bremen native and self-confessed Werder fan, Kosicke was an improbable architect of Bayern’s self-image. Yet in 2008, on a routine flight to a FIFA event in Switzerland with his then business partner Oliver Bierhoff, chance placed Uli Hoeneß in the same cabin. The Bayern strongman was frustrated, complaining about his own players and lamenting that nobody really knew what Bayern Munich stood for.

Kosicke pressed him. What did Hoeneß believe Bayern represented? The answer did not come.

That gap opened a door. Kosicke, who had spent years working for Nike and Adidas, told Hoeneß about the “company bibles” used by global brands, documents that spell out core values and messages for every employee. Hoeneß’s response was direct: could he create something similar for Bayern?

With what he later described as “100 per cent cluelessness but a lot of self-confidence,” Kosicke agreed. Hoeneß added one condition: he wanted Kosicke himself, not a polished consultancy “tie-wearing troupe” turning up at Säbener Straße.

So a working group formed. It was deliberately mixed: staff from the fan shop and marketing, the kit man, the youth coordinator, media chief Stefan Mennerich and chief scout Wolfgang Dremmler. For four weeks, they sat together and tried to pin down what Bayern really was. Out of that process came 16 “commandments” – internal rules of identity and behaviour. Among them: “We are a family and stand by one another,” and “We do not communicate about one another in public.”

The slogan, though, was never in doubt for Kosicke. “Mia san mia” was in his head from the moment he spoke to Hoeneß on the plane. He simply kept it to himself until the groundwork was done, wary of “shooting his bolt straight away”. The group built the values; the phrase would sit on top of them.

For the final presentation to the Bayern board, Kosicke went for symbolism. He had prototype copies of the new club “bible” bound in real lederhosen leather. When he unveiled the title, the reaction was instant. The board loved it. Hoeneß too, with one sharp correction. “Great slogan, but this MIR is a space station,” he said, spotting that the cover read “Mir san mir” instead of “Mia san mia”. The Bremen-born consultant had stumbled over Bavarian dialect. That was quickly fixed. The identity project was not.

Kosicke’s assignment did not end with a glossy booklet. Alongside the bible, he drew up a roadmap for how Bayern should live these values inside the club. Once that was in place, his job was done. When he sent his invoice, he also assigned his rights to the slogan and gave a promise: as a Bremen native and adviser to Jürgen Klopp, he would not tour the country presenting himself as the grand inventor of “Mia san mia”.

The plan was clear. Every new arrival at Bayern – whether an office employee, a youth player from Fürstenfeldbruck or a star signing like Sadio Mané – was to receive the bible as part of their onboarding. The message: this is who we are, this is how we behave.

From Werder fan to Bayern’s identity shaper, from brand strategist to national-team innovator, Kosicke has spent years defining what clubs stand for. Now he steps into the DFB with Klopp, charged with doing something far more complex: giving a whole football nation a sharper sense of itself.