Victor Orta pauses and sifts through his vast archive of scouting documents. January 30, 2017. A cold Saturday evening. The date of the first report he ever compiled on Robin Koch.
It is positive and complimentary and includes indicators which Orta automatically flagged. Defensively tidy, good anticipation and happy with the ball at his feet. The brand of centre-back Orta liked. Koch was not the original focus of that scouting trip but his performance in Hannover earned him mentions in dispatches. It pays for a recruitment team to be broad-minded.
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Orta has thousands of analytical reports on his laptop, the back catalogue of a modern director of football. He began shadowing Koch so long ago that he was in another job and employed by a different club when it was filed. “I wasn’t even in Leeds,” Orta says. “I was at Middlesbrough, no? But in football, there are not many players you sign without watching them for a long time. This is quite normal.”
A quick calculation tots up more than 1,300 days between Orta’s staff at Middlesbrough watching Koch play for Kaiserslautern and Leeds United signing him from Freiburg for £13 million in August. Koch came into play at Leeds after Brighton refused a final bid for Ben White but his transfer from Germany was genuinely years in the making. There was nothing last-ditch about Orta’s offer for him.
Kaiserlautern’s game at Hannover — a 1-0 defeat in 2017 — was a Bundesliga 2 fixture, the first after the winter break in the 2016-17 season. Orta’s main target was Martin Harnik, the Austrian striker who had scored at will before Christmas, and he wanted additional analysis of Kaiserslautern left-back Marcel Gaus, another player who interested him. But the references to Koch were enthusiastic enough for Orta to take notice and add him to “the list”.
“From Kaiserslautern, he appeared in our list of players to follow,” Orta tells The Athletic. “This list is constantly moving. We look at hundreds of players and we are scouting all the time so it always changes with new names and new faces.
“Players can leave the list because they move to a really good team and are unavailable. Or they sign a new contract and are too expensive. They can leave the list because their performances decrease. This happens from time to time.
“With Robin, he was always there. And one of the things we do at the start of each season, in September, is make a list of players who at the end of the season will have a contract ending in one year.” In negotiating terms it gave a buying club an advantage. Sellers would be left with the choice of taking a reduced fee or running the risk of losing a free agent 12 months later. Most were inclined to go for a reduced fee.
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Koch fell into that category in the close season of 2019. He had two years to go at Freiburg but he was very close to a call-up to the Germany squad and Freiburg accepted that his horizons would broaden as his ambition increased. Despite Leeds signing White on loan from Brighton in that window — and White’s exceptional form in Leeds’ Championship title-winning year — Orta continued to track Koch.
The defender’s strengths were right for Leeds’ head coach, Marcelo Bielsa, and Orta liked his background too, the son of a former professional footballer who had grown up in a footballing family and cut his teeth with no frills in Germany’s lower leagues. In terms of his personality, Koch would be grounded and switched-on; a talented, streetwise purchase.
Koch’s father, Harry, is best known for helping Kaiserslautern win the Bundesliga title in 1998, the club’s last top-flight championship, but his own career was built in the amateur and regional ranks. He was in his mid-twenties when Kaiserslautern hoisted him into the Bundesliga, a central defender like his son.
Harry says Koch “has a good eye for the game and technically, he is better than I ever was” but there are comparisons to be drawn between them. Koch’s first matches as a senior player were with Eintracht Trier, one of Germany’s lower-league teams. Harry finished his career there, retiring in 2006. For Koch there was no elite academy upbringing or steady professional path. Kaiserslautern signed him as a 20-year-old in 2015.
Local football, according to Harry, was good for his son. “When he moved up from Under-19s to the seniors at Trier in the fourth division, straight away it was obvious he could play at that level,” Harry says. “He really benefited from playing against grown men in a competitive league instead of going through the academy system. It made him tougher and more rounded as a player.”
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Orta agrees. Academy recruitment and development is a business in itself, heavily funded in England and Germany, but Orta admires the fact that Koch grew up in rougher surroundings. “In the position of centre-back it’s better that way,” Orta says. “One of my theories about the production of centre-backs in academies — and even in my time at Sevilla, this was the same — is that when you have really good teams, they never have a real challenge.
“Sevilla (at academy level) could win 5-0, 12-3 or 7-1 and it creates a situation where centre-backs are difficult to develop. Other players in other positions are OK because they perhaps get more of a challenge at 14, 15, 16 years old. You get good offensive players or right-backs, left-backs. But centre-backs who play away from academies are better, I think, because they improve from a younger age. They need more difficult football.”
Harry saw an ambitious streak in his son but to others, including Koch’s peers, his footballing ability was less obvious. Simon Berg, Koch’s best friend who grew up with him and lived next door to him in the village of Salmtal in south-west Germany, remembers thinking Koch’s younger brother Louis was the better of the two (Louis plays now for SV Alsenborn, a long way down the domestic pyramid).
“On the pitch he was never seen as a superstar talent,” Berg says. “Actually, many felt Louis was more talented. Robin was not obviously the best player but he was always very good, very calm and never afraid to make a mistake.” The penny dropped when the German FA invited Koch to feature in regional trials. “Only then did we realise,” says Berg.
In Salmtal, life was simple and good. Koch and Berg liked to go skiing locally and worked as paper boys for €30 a week, a poor rate of pay but enough to save up for football boots. As Berg puts it, both sets of parents told them that “we won’t become millionaires but it’s important to earn a bit of money for yourself”. They played for the same junior team, SV Durbach, and together they were part of their local school’s radio club. “Once a week we were allowed to play music in the big break, using two big speakers which we put outside into the yard,” Berg says. “We had to show the song lyrics to the teachers first because we liked German rap and some of it wasn’t deemed fit to broadcast. Censorship!”
There were occasional pranks, like the time the boys set fire to paper planes and threw them out of a classroom window, inviting accusations from their headteacher, but they had a useful habit of talking their way out of trouble. Koch, who Berg remembers playing as a 10 before he switched to a defensive position, joined Tier’s youth-team system and rapidly broke into their first team but was much the same as ever.
“He never had any airs and graces, thinking he was some kind of big shot when he started playing for Trier,” Berg says. “You never heard him dodge a party by saying, ‘Sorry, I’m trying to become a pro.’ That wasn’t him. He was part of the gang but never went too far and was never extreme. He was disciplined with the right balance between fun and work.”
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Koch’s competitive nature — both Harry and Berg describe him as a “terrible loser” — was summed up by a mediocre grade given to him for gymnastics. No one enjoyed gymnastics, Berg jokes, but Koch complained about the mark anyway and his parents were called in to speak to his teacher.
“The PE teacher pulled out a diary,” Berg says. “He showed his parents every little bad comment or dismissive gesture Robin had made over the year, the exact time and date — even Robin kicking a bench, that sort of stuff. We couldn’t believe it.” Harry concedes that Koch “can’t take losing” but insists he is someone who “looks at himself first and tries to rectify his own mistakes before finding fault with others.” What Koch did not want was undue attention. In 2015, Kaiserslautern signed him from Trier. It was big news in Salmtal and it was Koch’s big break but when Berg went to visit him, he found Koch enjoying an unglamorous lifestyle, trying hard not to live on his father’s reputation at Kaiserslautern.
“When he played there, he lived in an absolute pit, a high-rise that was quite run down,” Berg says. “None of the neighbours had any idea who he was.
“He liked it that way. He didn’t want the attention of being Harry’s son and so on. The postman was the only guy who recognised him and he wanted to stay off the grid. There was a similar story once when we went to a sports bar to watch a game. It was full of Kaiserslautern fans. They started talking to us and one of them said ‘You look like Robin Koch!’ Robin said, ‘Yes, I get that a lot.’ His biggest asset is his temperament. He never loses his cool.”
Koch made his debut for Kaiserslautern in 2016, three months before Orta first became aware of him. His outing against Hannover at the end of January was only his 11th for the club. He was slick and he was talented and there was very little chance of him staying under the radar for long. In the summer after that initial scouting report reached Orta, Koch moved to Freiburg and the Bundesliga for £3 million, on an ever-rising trajectory.
None of the people who knew Koch well were worried about his quick steps up the German ladder. He was very comfortable at Trier so a move to Kaiserslautern made sense. He settled well at Kaiserslautern so, to a Bundesliga club like Freiburg, he was worth a seven-figure investment. Freiburg used him in the Bundesliga almost immediately and Koch’s reputation continued to grow, leading to tentative talk about a future international call-up.
“That’s been the story,” Harry says. “Every time he moved up, he proved that he can play there. It’s been the same with going to the Premier League where he’s up against some of the best players in the world, and with the national team as well. I watch the games and mostly stay calm. I just worry that he doesn’t pick up any injuries.”
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Leeds, in Orta’s time, have tried more often than not to spend on potential. In some ways, their £27 million signing of Rodrigo from Valencia in August (a transfer completed on the same day that Koch came from Freiburg) broke the mould by landing a player at his peak. Koch was only 24, with fewer than 100 Bundesliga games behind him and many seasons in front of him. Orta could not see a downside.
“He’s a player who’s growing,” Orta says. “We analyse a lot of things, like his father was at Kaiserslautern when they won the league. His dad’s a former player, his family is based in football and he has that atmosphere around him. He understands the environment. But one of the most impressive things about Robin is that each year he grows. He comes up from lower divisions, he plays in the Bundesliga, he plays in the Germany national team. You say he has a lot more potential? I agree with that.”
Vincenzo Grifo, the Italy international, played with Koch at Freiburg for 18 months. They got on well and liked to watch episodes of ‘1:30’, a German comedy show, in the dressing room together. “We would cry with laughter,” Grifo says. “Robin’s a very cool guy who enjoys life and always has a smile on his face. He’s got a great sense of humour.
“It’s typical of his character that he didn’t opt for the safe option to stay in the Bundesliga but challenged himself by going to England. He wanted to get a taste of Bielsa, the outstanding tactician.
“He’s very vocal at the back and he loves to have the game in front of him. He’s an outstanding organiser. His improvement is incredibly rapid, including in the national team, and he’s on a path to become a world-class player, a monster centre-back.”
Harry was always happy for Koch to follow his own path and his own goals. For years, football was a hobby and no more than that. “It took until he was 16 before things got serious football-wise,” Harry says. “I used to give him a bit of advice about positioning and so on but we never put any pressure on him to make it as a pro. It just kind of happened for him.”
Freiburg warmed to Koch quickly and realised that they had a big asset on their hands, even before his Germany debut in October of last year. The natives of Freiburg were touched by him giving up time during the COVID-19 shutdown to help a charity in the city deliver food to the elderly and the vulnerable. But with Koch’s contract starting to run down, the club were vulnerable to offers and sympathetic to the idea that Koch might want to find a bigger stage. It did not take much bartering for Leeds to agree a £13 million fee.
“When the player decides that we are his choice, it’s a strong situation for us,” Orta says. “His club cannot use another club to increase the price because the player wants to come.” On August 30 Koch said his goodbyes and boarded a private jet for England.
One of the things that registered about Koch when he arrived in England and underwent a medical was his physique. If he looked slight from a distance then close up he was blessed with strength and surprising muscle mass; the Incredible Hulk, as one of the medical team jokingly called him.
Three months in the Premier League have been a period of teething for Koch. There have been wobbles and errors, like the penalty conceded against Fulham and the backpass which led to Leicester City’s opening goal in a 4-1 defeat at Elland Road, but accomplished displays too in which Koch has actively looked for the ball, shown the conviction to use it and a willingly carried it forward from deep. A few wayward passes in Sunday’s 0-0 draw with Arsenal were still the searching attempts Bielsa looks for and it was a straight ball from Koch which teed up Rodrigo for a shot off the crossbar in the second half.
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Even a shaky debut against Liverpool, in which Koch conceded a penalty and lost his man for Liverpool’s second goal, did not worry him unduly. “I talked to him after the Liverpool game,” Berg says. “It’s not the best way to start your Premier League career but he was pretty upbeat, determined not to let it affect him. That’s who he is.”
Koch had no way of avoiding comparisons to White at Elland Road. White was a revelation, almost flawless in the Championship and so good that Leeds were ready to pay upwards of £25 million for him. Brighton, though, were unwilling to engage in talks and the impasse turned Leeds towards Koch. The nuts and bolts of a transfer from Freiburg were already in place. Since May, and even before Leeds were promoted to the Premier League, the club had been in contact with him, sending videos and a Powerpoint presentation to introduce him to Bielsa’s tactics. A report commissioned from the analytics firm StatsBomb highlighted numerous similarities between him and White and suggested that Koch would provide more aerial dominance at the back.
It did not seem to matter to Koch that a transfer to Elland Road was dependent on Leeds going up and then either failing or deciding not to sign White, their top target. He studied their presentation regardless and was captivated by it, a detailed overview of Bielsa’s mindset and thoroughness. If an offer materialised, he would take it. And a fee of £13 million would be no problem for Leeds with Premier League revenue in their pocket. It all came together a fortnight before the start of the Premier League season.
“Everything was done under conditions from Freiburg, with Freiburg’s permission,” Orta says. “With the presentation, that happened in May. Everyone talks about it like it was something special, and it’s true that it was really detailed, but we are like Liverpool, like (Manchester) City, like Leicester. We wanted to show him what we think is good, what’s not so good, how we play and what we will ask of him. We want to give him all the information about what we are as a team.
“You have to make a player realise that you know him really well. You have to make a player think that you are serious about him, that you care. You’re not doing this on a whim or for bad reasons. You value the player and that makes him want to sign for you more. You know who he is.”
Because of that, Koch touched down at Leeds-Bradford Airport with Bielsa’s tactics and ideas lodged in his head. Orta, so many years after that first scouting report from Germany, felt like he had met Koch a thousand times over, a name forever on his list. It was White who Leeds went after first. But perhaps the deal for Koch was always meant to be.
(Photos: Getty Images)