Marc Kosicke: Architect of Bayern's Identity and Klopp's Right-Hand Man
Jürgen Klopp did not arrive at the DFB alone. He brought the man who has quietly shaped some of German football’s most powerful ideas for nearly two decades.
Marc Kosicke, long known as Klopp’s right-hand man, will now serve as “assistant coach for strategy, development and innovation” with the national team. To clear the way, he has stepped down as managing director of his company Projekt Five and ended his advisory work for other coaches. One client remains: Klopp.
“It is not enough for only a head coach to come in,” Klopp said at his unveiling. “We have to change a great many things. We want to turn over every stone.” If anyone in German football embodies that kind of structural thinking, it is Kosicke.
From Werder fan to Bayern’s identity architect
Kosicke’s path is anything but ordinary. A Bremen-born, self-confessed Werder supporter, he became known as the “inventor” of the coach adviser role and worked with Julian Nagelsmann until 2021. Before that, he left a deep imprint at Bayern Munich — at the very heart of the club’s identity.
The irony is delicious. A Werder fan and adviser to Borussia Dortmund’s most successful modern coach helping Bayern Munich find its soul.
The story began in 2008 on a flight to Switzerland. Kosicke was travelling to a FIFA event with his then business partner Oliver Bierhoff. On the same plane sat Uli Hoeneß. The Bayern boss was frustrated, complaining about his own players and lamenting that nobody really knew what Bayern Munich stood for anymore.
Kosicke listened. Then he asked Hoeneß a simple question: what, exactly, did he think Bayern stood for?
Hoeneß had no clear answer.
That gap — between Bayern’s power and its self-understanding — became Kosicke’s opening. He told Hoeneß about his years with Nike and Adidas, and about “company bibles” that spell out a firm’s values and messages for every employee. Hoeneß wanted something similar for Bayern and asked Kosicke if he could create it.
“With 100 per cent cluelessness but a lot of self-confidence, I agreed,” Kosicke recalled with a laugh in a 2023 interview with SPOX and GOAL. Hoeneß added one condition: he wanted to see Kosicke alone, “not some Roland Berger tie-wearing troupe.”
So Kosicke assembled a deliberately mixed working group inside the club. People from the fan shop and marketing. The kit man. The youth coordinator. Media chief Stefan Mennerich. Chief scout Wolfgang Dremmler. For four weeks, they sat together and worked on Bayern’s values.
The result would become one of the most famous slogans in world football.
The birth of “Mia san mia”
For Kosicke, the phrase was clear from day one. “Mia san mia” — the Bavarian dialect for “We are who we are” — was already in his head during that first conversation on the plane with Hoeneß. He kept it to himself at the time, not wanting to “shoot his bolt straight away.” The working group’s job was to build the value system around it.
They ended up with 16 “commandments” for the club. Lines such as: “We are a family and stand by one another.” Or: “We do not communicate about one another in public.” It was a codified identity, designed to be lived from the boardroom to the dressing room.
For the final presentation to the Bayern board, Kosicke went for symbolism. He had several prototype copies of the new “bible” bound in real lederhosen leather. When he unveiled the title, the room responded immediately. The slogan hit home.
There was only one problem. On the cover it did not say “Mia san mia” but “Mir san mir.”
As a man from Bremen, Kosicke admitted he was “not 100 per cent fluent in Bavarian.” Hoeneß joked: “Great slogan, but this MIR is a space station.” The wording was corrected. The core idea stayed.
Kosicke’s work did not end with the slogan and the leather-bound books. He also drew up a roadmap for how Bayern should embed these values across the club. Once that was done, his mission in Munich was complete.
When he sent his invoice, he took an extra step: he assigned his rights to the slogan to Bayern and reassured them. As someone from Bremen and adviser to Jürgen Klopp, he would not parade himself as the great inventor of “Mia san mia.”
The club, in turn, planned to use the bible as a standard onboarding tool. Every new arrival, from an office employee to a youth player from Fürstenfeldbruck to a star signing like Sadio Mané, was to receive it with a clear message: this is who we are, these are the values we live by.
From “Mia san mia” to the DFB
Kosicke’s influence has often been invisible to the wider public, but inside German football his fingerprints are everywhere. He helped formalise the role of the coach adviser. He worked alongside Nagelsmann. He shaped Bayern’s self-image. And now he steps directly into the national team structure.
Klopp has promised upheaval at the DFB, a cultural and sporting reset. To “turn over every stone,” he wants more than tactics and training plans. He wants a framework, a shared understanding, a set of lived values.
He has turned to the man who once bound Bayern’s identity in lederhosen leather.
The question now is not what Kosicke has done for clubs in the past. It is what kind of footballing identity he and Klopp will script for Germany next.
