New Sheffield Wednesday manager cites two Bayern Munich legends as vital experience

At 34-years-old the new Owls boss is the youngest manager in the whole English Football League, younger even than Bradford City’s interim player-manager, Kevin McDonald.

But the former Germany assistant isn’t concerned that he’ll have one Owl – Lee Gregory – older than him, or that others are around the same age, it was something he dealt with in Munich with some pretty big names. Robert Lewandowski and Manuel Neuer aren’t bad.

“It’s about experience,” he told The Star. “In Munich I had Lewandowski, and he was older than me - as well as Manuel Neuer. It’s important that you find a good a relationship with them, to build up something, and it’s also about the human. It’s not about the player or their age, it’s about them as a human - and when everyone is open-minded then you can be successful in the future.”

Röhl also explained that he wasn’t coming into Hillsborough with a set formation in mind, insisting that it was his ‘principles’ and how the players take to them that will decide how they set up and play.

He went on to say, “I have my principles in my mind, and I look to bring them in - then I’ll decide which shape we’ll play. It’s more about principles than formation. We can play with a five, with a four, but the principles are non-negotiable.

“We need to be compact, we need to win the ball high, we need to push the opponent away from our goal, and make sure we attack at the right moments… These are some of the things.”

He’s done his dossiers and watched hours of Owls footage already, but today the work really starts as Röhl gets out on the pitches at Middlewood Road with his new players in preparation for the trip to Watford on October 21^st for his first game – and the hope is that he’ll have his technical staff finalised by the time they get on the bus headed south.

Sascha Lense and Benjamin Ehresmann may well be two of the four, but we’ll have to wait and see when things get finalised.