What a journey: Just six years ago, Alexander Nouri was standing on the sidelines as coach of Hertha BSC in Germany, and now he works for McDonald’s.

Former Bundesliga coach Alexander Nouri will be devoting himself to burgers instead of the back four in the future. From the beginning of 2026, the former soccer coach of Werder Bremen and Hertha BSC will be running two McDonald’s restaurants in North Rhine-Westphalia, as he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. “I’m not going in there and saying, ‘I know how it works,’” says Nouri. “I’m here to learn.”

According to the report, Nouri applied to become a franchisee and even fried burgers himself during his training. “Ultimately, both worlds are about getting people on board. In soccer, it’s the players; here, it’s the employees. But the basic principle is the same: you have to understand who you’re dealing with, what drives them, what they need to perform,” he says of his new role. Nouri, born in Buxtehude, played for Werder Bremen, KFC Uerdingen, VfL Osnabrück, and Holstein Kiel, among others. In the summer of 2012, he ended his career with the second team of VfB Oldenburg. In the 2009/10 season, he played 16 games for Holstein Kiel. The 46-year-old was an attacking midfielder. In the 1998/99 season, he won the UI Cup with Werder Bremen. He also won three state cups with the SVW second team and one with VfL Osnabrück.

Nouri was promoted from U23 coach to interim and then head coach at Werder in 2016, but had to leave in October 2017 after a long losing streak. After a brief spell in Ingolstadt, he became assistant coach to Jürgen Klinsmann at Hertha at the end of 2019 and took over the team after Klinsmann’s sudden departure—albeit only for four Bundesliga games. In 2022, his last known engagement in the soccer industry ended in Greece after just a few months.