Oliver Glasner, the Cup-Final Coach Now Fighting the League Table at Nottingham Forest

Oliver Glasner

Photo: Sven Mandel / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 28, 1974 Salzburg
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	UEFA Europa League · FA Cup · FA Community Shield · UEFA Conference League · Austrian Cup · LMA John Duncan Award · Premier League Manager of the Month

Oliver Glasner’s reputation rests on nights that were not supposed to go his way. Eintracht Frankfurt, a mid-table side in the Bundesliga, won a European trophy under him. Crystal Palace, a club that had never won a major honour, beat Manchester City at Wembley and then lifted a European cup of their own. Nottingham Forest hired him for that touch. What they also hired is a coach whose league seasons rarely match his cup runs, and whose exits tend to come early, with an argument attached.

He knows what it is to have a plan cut short. Born in Salzburg and raised in Riedau, a small town in Upper Austria, he spent almost his entire playing life as a defender at SV Ried, a provincial club he helped to win the Austrian Cup twice. His career did not fade; it stopped. An aerial challenge in a league match against Rapid Wien left him concussed, and a few days later he was in surgery with a bleed on the brain, followed by a medical instruction never to play again.

That was August 2011. Glasner, born on 28 August 1974, was a few weeks short of his 37th birthday and had already planned to retire the following summer. “The doctors advised me never to play again,” he told UEFA when he announced it. He left with more than 500 league games behind him and, unusually for a footballer, a business degree from the University of Hagen, finished in 2006 while he was still playing. Within a year he was at Red Bull Salzburg, first in an office role and then as assistant to Roger Schmidt in the pressing machine Ralf Rangnick was building there.

His first jobs in charge were a return to Ried in 2014 and then four seasons at LASK, where he was coach and sporting director at once. LASK came up from the second tier, finished fourth and then second behind Salzburg in 2019, a Champions League qualifying place for a club that had spent almost two decades away from Europe. VfL Wolfsburg followed: seventh in his first season, fourth and a Champions League place in 2021. He left anyway. His relationship with sporting director Jörg Schmadtke had broken down, and captain Josuha Guilavogui said on the way out: “I’m happy he’s gone.”

Frankfurt made his name outside the German-speaking world. His first season there opened with a cup exit to third-tier Waldhof Mannheim and a team hovering near the relegation places in November. It ended in Seville in May 2022, where Frankfurt beat Rangers 5-4 on penalties in the Europa League final after knocking out Barcelona and West Ham United, unbeaten in 13 European matches. In the Bundesliga that same side finished 11th. The following season brought the club’s first Champions League campaign, which reached the last 16 before Napoli ended it, and a DFB-Pokal final lost 2-0 to RB Leipzig. The league form drained away again, and he left a year before his contract ran out.

Crystal Palace appointed him in February 2024 to replace Roy Hodgson, and the change showed within weeks: his first away win came at Anfield, and the season closed with a 5-0 against Aston Villa on the final day. He built the team in his usual 3-4-2-1, wing-backs pushed high and wide with the ball, a compact 5-4-1 block without it. In May 2025 Eberechi Eze scored at Wembley and Dean Henderson saved a penalty from Omar Marmoush as Palace beat Manchester City 1-0 in the FA Cup final, the first major trophy in the club’s history. The Community Shield against Liverpool followed on penalties that August.

Then UEFA moved Palace out of the Europa League and into the Conference League, because former co-owner John Textor also held a controlling interest in Lyon. Nottingham Forest took the Europa League place. Glasner won the smaller competition instead, beating Rayo Vallecano 1-0 in Leipzig on 27 May 2026 with a goal from Jean-Philippe Mateta. It was Palace’s first European trophy, in their first European campaign, and it was his last match in charge.

The trophy count flatters a more uneven record. His league peaks came at LASK and Wolfsburg; at the two clubs that made him famous, the tables told another story, with 11th and seventh at Frankfurt and 12th for Palace in the FA Cup year. The winter of 2025-26 was worse: ten matches without a win, and a public break with his own club. On 16 January he confirmed he would leave in the summer. The next day, after a 2-1 defeat at Sunderland and with the sale of captain Marc Guéhi to Manchester City being finalised, he said the squad was being abandoned and that selling a captain the day before a game showed no understanding. Read one way, that is a coach shielding his players from a selling club. Read another, it is the same breakdown with the people above him that ended his time at Wolfsburg.

Forest appointed him on 6 July 2026 as their fifth head coach in twelve months, after Vítor Pereira had kept them up and taken them to a Europa League semi-final. Owner Evangelos Marinakis called him “a winner”. The club’s statement named Wolfsburg and Frankfurt but not Crystal Palace, a pointed silence given the Europa League place Forest had inherited from them. Glasner spoke of joining “a two-time European Champion with one of the most passionate fan bases in football”. The summer rebuilt the squad around him: Elliot Anderson left for Manchester City for £116m, Liam Delap arrived from Chelsea for £50m, and Daniel Muñoz followed his old coach from Selhurst Park.

The start has been hard. Forest lost their opening league match to Leeds United and then lost to Leeds again in the League Cup within 72 hours. A win at Villa Park in September remains their only league victory in seven matches. On 11 October Glasner went back to Selhurst Park and lost 3-1. A week later Noni Madueke’s late, deflected goal gave Arsenal a 1-0 win at the City Ground, a third straight defeat that dropped Forest into the bottom three. He had held captain Morgan Gibbs-White back from that match, calling it “a rational decision” with another game days away.

That game is at Ipswich Town on Friday 23 October, followed by Brentford away and Manchester City at the City Ground on 7 November. There is no European tie on the calendar and no final in sight, only the weekly arithmetic of the league table, the part of Glasner’s record that has always been harder to read than the finals.

Tags: sports, athletes, Premier League, football managers, Crystal Palace, Nottingham Forest, Oliver Glasner