One question for each 2026 World Cup team. Can Ralf Rangnick and Austria break the pretty good barrier?
Would you love me in a Bentley? Would you love me on a $95 bus from downtown Boston to Gillette Stadium? Footnote is asking 48 questions, and they’re all about the 48 teams at the 2026 World Cup. This post is part of our Group J preview. You can also read previews of Argentina, Algeria, and Jordan.
Can Ralf Rangnick and Austria break the pretty good barrier?
In global soccer terms, Austria have been pretty much a non-entity since the end of World War II.
Austria were one of the great sides of international football between World Wars, but after their great 1930s side was stolen by the Nazis, the country never quite recovered as a soccer power.
Aside from a third place finish in Switzerland in 1954, Austria’s big tournament history through the second half of the 20th century consisted of occasionally showing up at the World Cup to be eliminated in the group stage.
That changed in the 2000s, thanks to a combination of immigration, investment, and coaching innovation.
A nation of just 8 million at the turn of the 21st century, Austria’s population has grown consistently over the course of the last 20 years owing in large part to a steady wave of immigration. Largely, immigrants to Austria over the past decades have been from other parts of Eastern Europe, particularly former Yugoslav nations and Turkey.
A population boom — particularly in a country where soccer is extremely popular — often means more kids getting into academies and more chances for those kids to become good soccer players. David Alaba, Marko Arnautović, and Aleksandar Dragović are all in the top five for all-time Austria national team appearances, and they are all children of immigrants.
But just having a growing population does not necessarily mean a country gets better at international soccer. People also have to start spending money, and usually a lot of money, on player development.
Luckily for Austria, another thing that happened in the early 2000s is that an Austrian company founded to help Thai truck drivers stay awake decided that it would be neat to upend the world of football.
Austrian entrepreneur Dietrich Mateschitz founded Red Bull in the 1980s, and quickly the energy drink identified extreme sports sponsorships as a way to boost awareness for the brand as a source of high octane adrenaline. They moved onto soccer in 2005, starting naturally enough with an Austrian team: SV Austria Salzburg.
After rebranding the team to Red Bull Salzburg, the company quickly made the Austrian side a cornerstone of its growing soccer empire, a centralized proving grown from which players would be funneled out to clubs in the United States or Britain or up to their (eventual) Bundesliga club RB Leipzig.
There are plenty of reasons to feel negatively about the ultimate impact of the Red Bull empire on global soccer, and the pernicious effects of multi-club ownership more generally. But that’s mostly for a different blog. For this blog, what’s important is that the energy drink company got really good at developing players in Austria.
Lots of the players were from around the world, like Benjamin Sesko, Erling Haaland, Takumi Minamino, or Sadio Mane. But lots of players developed in the Salzburg academy are now stars for Austria’s national team. Austria’s defensive midfield duo of Nicolas Seiwald and Xaver Schlager were both Salzburg academy players, as was attacking midfielder Marcel Sabitzer and Konrad Laimer, who will play mostly as a left back but is arguably Austria’s most important player.
The final key piece to the Austria semi-renaissance is the coach who helped create modern football, helped mastermind the Red Bull network, and also happens to coach the national team right now. Ralf Rangnick is widely credited with popularizing Gegenpressing, a system of pressing that is highly complex and coordinated, but mostly means running really hard to win the ball back as soon as you lose it.
In various executive roles for Red Bull’s soccer apparatus from 2012 to 2021, Ragnick implemented his style of football across the Red Bull system. In doing so helped inspire the way that many of the most successful coaches of the era set their teams up, including Thomas Tuchel and Julain Nagelsmann — both of whom will be coaching World Cup contenders this summer.
What all of this has added up to is that Austria is now pretty good, but not much more than that. They managed some impressive performances at Euro 2024 under Ragnick, most notably a 3-2 victory over the Netherlands. But they weren’t able to quite carry that momentum into the knockouts, falling to Turkey at the first hurdle. Austria still have not won a knockout match since 1954.
Ragnick will hope that with another couple of years of his coaching, this core of players can finally break through the barrier of being pretty good.
A lot will hinge on how much Alaba and Arnautović, the team’s veteran leaders, have to give in their final tournament. Alaba is one of the most skilled defenders in the history of the game. He’s just 33 but he’s an old 33, playing professional matches as early as 15. The last section of Alaba’s Real Madrid career was heavily impacted by injury, and he only managed 424 league minutes last year. For over a decade, Alaba’s combination of amazing left-footed passing and shooting as well as defensive skill have made observers pick Austria as potential surprise contenders. If he can stay healthy this summer, this is his last chance to make that happen.
Arnautović meanwhile will likely start up front. The 37-year-old striker has had a long, roller coaster career that has included starring for midtable clubs and picking up bench minutes for Champions League giants. He’s also Austria’s all-time leading goalscorer, and will more than likely need to extend that record this summer for them to have any chance to improve on their Euros performance.
The story of Austrian football in the 2000s is one of steady slow growth. But there is also a window of opportunity closing on two of the players who helped create that growth. In their return to the World Cup for the first time this century, Austria will need this to be the moment it finally comes together to break the glass ceiling of a knockout stage victory.
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