Ralf Rangnick has confirmed the additions of assistant coach Chris Armas and sports psychologist Sascha Lense to the Manchester United backroom staff.
Armas was sacked by Major League Soccer side Toronto FC in July and is familiar to Rangnick from his time as assistant coach and then head coach of New York Red Bulls when Rangnick was sporting director of the Red Bull group.
Lense was recruited by Rangnick to work at RB Leipzig in 2015 and also worked at Schalke. Both Lense and Armas are waiting to obtain work permits.
"It won't be that many, so far I'm very happy to work with the staff I have met in the last week," Rangnick explained. "They gave me a lot of help in the last couple of days in preparation for the Crystal Palace game.
"We have decided to bring in a sports psychologist, with Sascha Lense. He's from Germany, a former second division player. I used to work with him for three years at Leipzig, one year in the year that we won promotion from the second to the first division, with myself, and the following two years when Ralph Hasenhuttl was head coach.
"So we know each other since then. He will be introduced to the team as soon as he has got his visa and work permit. I hope we will have him on board tomorrow or at the latest Thursday.
"Chris Armas used to be the assistant coach at New York Red Bulls under Jesse Marsch, that was five years ago when I first met him. Since then, we have met quite frequently.
"Also in my role as head of global for Red Bull, in the last three years he was the head coach for the New York Red Bulls and Toronto in the MLS. He will again hopefully join our team in the next two days.
"I don’t know what the situation is like here and in other clubs. In Germany, most clubs have employed sports psychologists or mental coach whatever you would like to call them.
"For me, it is absolutely logical. I even had somebody like this, Hans-Dieter Hermann, the current sport psychologist of the German national team, back in 1998 in Ulm. For me, it is a question of logic.
"If you have special coaches for goalkeeping, physical education, even for strikers, fitness, whatever, you should also have an expert for the brain. It’s not so much putting them on the red sofa and holding hands for the players because most of them won’t do that anyway.
"For me, it is about helping the players that the brain should assist the body not to work against it. The players and even the coaching staff, everybody in our team, should think in the right way.
"Whenever we speak about football we know that the major part is up here. What do you think, how do you analyse the situation.
"And therefore, I'm very happy to have Sascha on board. He is hands-on. He is not working too much on the theory, he is hands-on. Having worked together at Leipzig I know we will benefit a lot. For me it is vital that we should have the best possible person on this job."
