LEIPZIG, Germany — A little more than three years ago, the man in charge of the most ambitious project in European soccer sat in front of a promising young player in a Cypriot hotel and told him the future.
At the time, the man, Ralf Rangnick, a well-traveled German coach with an urbane, faintly academic air, seemed an unlikely clairvoyant. And his pitch to Yussuf Poulsen, a young Danish forward, did not seem to be a strong one. Rangnick’s club, RB Leipzig, was attempting to escape the fourth tier of German soccer. It did not have a famous name, or much of a history.