"I'm very excited for the new season!" ~ Oliver Mintzlaff | RB Leipzig

I'm very excited. We're coming off a fantastic season, but now there's a new one starting up and we're heading into it with a completely different team and a new head coach. We're happy that pre-season has gone well so far and that our players that have been away at the EUROs have performed well and didn't pick up any serious injuries. Our excitement is high and now it's about preparing ourselves well and being ready for our sixth Bundesliga season.

He's a great guy. He's a hard worker, as they say in America. He's the first to show up and the last to leave. He has a clear philosophy, but he's also someone who can bring people together and who prioritises team spirit. He can get people on board and emphasises mentality, mindset and commitment, which will help make us better.

In the end, it's Jesse who will define that as the head coach. Together with Jesse, we looked for two assistant coaches that would fit to our team and to our head coach. Achim already knows the club intimately and has experience as a head coach as well, from Köln and Mainz. He's now returning to take up this role, which he's very excited for. Marco also has the RB DNA and knows how the club works, he knows the employees here and practises a similar style of play. For us, it felt like a good fit and Jesse naturally took the time to speak to both of them and then said that these two would be his assistants. We will have to see when the season starts how they will divide their duties.

Of course we're happy, he's a player that we were able to observe often last season. We saw how he was able to score 28 goals for Eintracht Frankfurt. When we sat down with Jesse, who was of course involved in every aspect of our business right from the start, we naturally spoke about whether this would be a good option for us, if the finances were right. There was a release clause that allowed us to stay within our budget in order to sign him. We're looking forward to him joining us and hope that he's now able to recharge after the EUROs in order to come to Leipzig ready to go.

We're focused on ourselves and aren't looking at what Bayern or Dortmund or other top teams are doing. We're focused on us and of course we want to now take that next step. We have always said that there are no shortcuts to success, but that you have to do it yourself, at your own pace. These are things that the fans hear from us every year but it's the same thing every year because we also need to continue working on ourselves. Which we've been able to do quite well at over the course of our last five Bundesliga seasons and want to continue doing in our sixth season. We have a new coach in Jesse, who will be trying to push the team with his energy, and will maybe be able to get things out of the team that we haven't been able to do before, and that will maybe give us that extra push we need to reach that next level.

Yes, of course we could have done with being drawn against an easier opponent but that's just how it goes and if, as has been the case for us twice over the last three years, want to reach the final then you have to beat Sandhausen in the first round. We are playing in Sandhausen, who are a strong side, but so are we and we will be focused on making sure that we don't underestimate them but that we approach the task with ambition and take it seriously. As I said, we made it to Berlin twice in the last three years and the first time it was a completely different experience, even if we did go on to lose both games, because the whole city was behind us and the atmosphere in the stadium was electric and because our fans were there. We want to repeat that now and hopefully have it end differently to our two previous appearances in the final.

You're welcome.