Bundesliga
Erik ten Hag and Sandro Wagner were among the first names to be confirmed as new coaches in the Bundesliga for the 2025/26 season, but they were by no means the only ones. bundesliga.com keeps you up to date with all the managerial arrivals ahead of the new campaign...
Erik ten Hag (Bayer Leverkusen)
Having previously coached Bayern Munich’s reserve side between 2013 and 2015, Ten Hag returns to Germany as Leverkusen’s head coach, where he’ll look to knock his old club off their title-winning perch.
If he were to lead Die Werkself to another Bundesliga title it wouldn’t be the Dutchman’s first piece of silverware in Germany, as he led the Bayern reserves to the Bavarian 2013/14 Regionalliga title (fourth tier), scoring 94 goals on the way to lifting the trophy.
That spell in the lower reaches of German football is sandwiched in between coaching stints in his homeland, where he had spells at FC Twente, PSV Eindhoven, Go Ahead Eagles, Utrecht and most notably Ajax.
Watch: Erik ten Hag unveiled as Leverkusen head coach
His time at Ajax marked just his third permanent position as head coach in the Netherlands, but the first to really put his name on the map. He collected six honours while at the Amsterdam club, three of them being league titles, as well as leading them to a UEFA Champions League semi-final, having beaten Real Madrid 4-1 at the Bernabeu on their way to the final four of the competition in the 2018/19 season.
He joins Leverkusen on the back of a two-year spell in England with Manchester United, where he picked up FA Cup and League Cup winners' medals before being dismissed in October last year.
It’s not just Ten Hag that earned his coaching stripes in the Bavarian Regionalliga though, with new Augsburg boss Wagner having claimed that same league title with SpVgg Unterhaching at the end of the 2022/23 season.
Former Bayern, Hoffenhem and Darmstadt striker Wagner won 47 of 78 games overall in his first senior coaching position. In his second season in the job he led the club into the 3. Liga before accepting Julian Nagelsmann’s call to become his assistant with the Germany national team in September 2023.
Watch: Augsburg welcome Sandro Wagner
Wagner spent almost two years in the post, forming part of a coaching team that led Germany to the EURO 2024 quarter-finals.
Now his first role flying solo in the top flight is to improve an Augsburg side that finished 12th in the Bundesliga in 2024/25, one place lower but four points better off than the previous season.
Watch: Wagner's top 5 Bundesliga goals
Having been an assistant to Steffen Baumgart at boyhood club Hamburg, Polzin took over the first-team reins on an interim basis in November 2024 when Baumgart was dismissed. The 34-year-old was soon given the role permanently just one month later, making him the youngest coach in Germany’s top two tiers.
Unfazed by the task of taking Hamburg back to the Bundesliga, Polzin oversaw nine wins, four draws and four losses from the remaining 17 games of the season, a run of form that led the Red Shorts back into the top flight for the first time since their one and only relegation in 2017/18.
Polzin will now face the very different challenge of trying to keep Hamburg in the league, and will come up against former colleague Baumgart, now of Union Berlin, in the process.
Watch: Hamburg back at last!
Much like others on this list, 2025/26 will be Steffen’s first time coaching in the Bundesliga. Now with Werder Bremen, the 56-year-old came close to making the jump into the top tier with Elversberg thanks to a third-place finish in Bundesliga 2 last term.
Despite having fallen at the subsequent promotion/relegation play-off hurdle against Heidenheim, Steffen’s side gathered plenty of admirers, both for their attractive style of play and their rise through the divisions all the way to the Bundesliga's doorstep.
Watch: The best of Elversberg in 2024/25
Having taken over when they were in the fourth tier, Steffen steered Elversberg to 11th place in their first ever Bundesliga 2 campaign in 2023/24. Last season, his charges were the joint-second highest scoring side in the league with 64 goals, behind only Hamburg (78), with young talents such as Fisnik Asllani blossoming under his guidance.
He’ll now take over a Bremen side who ended up just one point away from European football in 2024/25, with hopes of helping them take that next step in the upcoming season.
Having led Paderborn to fourth place in the Bundesliga 2 last season, just three points behind Steffen’s Elversberg, Kwasniok will also get his first taste of coaching in the Bundesliga in 2025/26 having taken over at newly promoted Cologne.
Kwasniok was appointed at Paderborn ahead of the 2021/22 season and oversaw an impressive campaign that ended in seventh place, four points and two rungs higher than the previous year.
He proved it was no one-off, with subsequent sixth and seventh-placed finished in 2022/23 and 2023/24 confirming the 43-year-old's status as a coach in the ascendancy.
Having started his coaching journey in amateur football with OSV Rastatt in southern Germany, stints at Karlsruhe, Carl Zeiss Jena and Saarbrücken have helped him rise to the top tier.
Paul Simonis replaces Ralph Hasenhüttl at Wolfsburg, who ended 2024/25 nine points outside the top six following on an eight-game winless run.
The 40-year-old Dutchman arrives at the Volkswagen Arena after just one season as a senior head coach, but having guided Go Ahead Eagles to their first major title in over 90 years by winning the Dutch Cup.
Simonis, who started his coaching career in the Sparta Rotterdam academy before working as assistant at Go Ahead and Herrenveen, also steered the Eagles to a seventh-placed finish in the Eredivisie.
"Paul works in great detail in all areas, has the same ideas and concepts in terms of content and structure about how we want to perform on the pitch in future and how we want to reorganise Wolfsburg with fresh impetus and at the same time consistently advance its development. Paul also brings a great deal of energy and passion." said Wolfsburg managing director Peter Christiansen of the appointment on 12 June.