I'm Joe Devine and welcome to Whiteboard Football Extra.

In this series of short podcasts, we'll be talking to the writers of our videos, taking a more in-depth look at the topics they choose to discuss.

We'll also be engaging with user comments, so if after watching a video you have follow-up

questions, we have an opportunity to answer them.

It's not often that a manager so young has the authority and demeanour to perfect the

highest standard of cohesion within their team.

Yet at 29 years old, that's precisely what

Hoffenheim manager Julian Nagelsman has done. I'm joined by the writer of our recent tactical

video on Hoffenheim, Alex Stewart, to discuss this topic in more depth. Alex, you begin the video

with a quote from Julian Nagelsman who says that management is 30% tactics and 70% social competence.

But given his broad and quite heavily influenced approach to team tactics as the video shows,

do you see this comment as an honest appraisal of his job or as a sort of tactic within itself?

I think what Nagelsman's saying is that you can set your team up in a particular way

with a particular system, but it's actually more important to manage the players within that,

to get them to buy in to what you're asking them to do.

And I think to an extent having players who are sufficiently tactically aware to make something

work, obviously if you say that you've got, I don't know, a 30, 70% split, 40, 60, whatever it is,

that doesn't necessarily mean that in absolute terms, tactics aren't important. I think it's pretty

clear that Nagelsman is a tactician.

You know, he's somebody who spends a lot of time and effort thinking about not just what

the general kind of systematic DNA of his side should be, but also how that needs to

respond to the different tactical challenges faced by the opponents that he's got.

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