Germany, the land of sausages, beers, iconic cars
and football, right?
But those days are over.
Germany are no longer part of the elite in modern football.
Hansi Flick has been sacked.
Julian Nagelsmann has been picked as the new coach.
What is going on in German football? "Too much politics", some say,
"Just focus on the game and play football."
Others say "Germany have simply lost their good old fighting mentality".
You know it was always like we run, fight, and all this stuff. But you really need to see it…
But is it really that simple? I think it goes much deeper.
Germany has a problem. And it starts right here with the youngest kids on the pitch.
Germany’s next generation.
They dream of becoming stars in the Bundesliga and the national team.
But all these exciting talents we’ve seen in Germany lately are not German.
Even Germany’s biggest prospect spent most of his childhood in England.
Jamal Musiala. He was developed at Chelsea and Southampton.
A huge talent pool. But we do not give them the best education.
Germany are struggling to develop world class players.
In almost every position. No elite full backs, no world class no.9 strikers.
Long gone are the days of Miroslav Klose and Philipp Lahm.
Some nations like Spain or England bring more players to an absolute top level.
We have Florian Wirtz, of course we do. But why haven’t we got 10?
What is going wrong in German football?
We meet Germany legends, coaches and critics to find out more.
How can Germany reform itself to get back to the top?
Let’s go find out, shall we?
Let’s start with the facts.
Football still is the most popular sport in Germany by far.
The German FA is the biggest sports federation worldwide.
1.3 million kids under 14 play the beautiful game.
The problem, many of these kids stop playing when they get older.
Only 400,000 are left in the 15-18 age group.
And that number is decreasing every year.
Only a few will eventually make it and become pros.
But German Under-23 players are getting less and less playing time in the Bundesliga.
From 21% in 2010 to just 6% in 2020.
So the German FA came up with a plan.
We need to rethink youth football, we need to overhaul the system,
change youth football as we know it.
A revolution in German football.
The German FA implemented a new format in kids football
and it’s getting rolled out all over the country,
mandatory from the 2024 season.
A huge challenge because in Germany
you have 21 local football associations below the FA with their own interests.
The new game format looks like this.
Not just two, but four mini goals.
And smaller pitches and teams with only 3 to 4 players.
In which way does that help developing the skills
so they can maybe be successful at a later stage in their career?
I’m totally convinced that in this age you build the frame, the base.
Because if you play 7 vs 7, there are maybe 80 per cent of the kids who do not have the ball,
and they can not develop their skills, their technique, their dribbling skills.
Be yourself, be creative, do mistakes.
It’s more about you, your individuality!
Give them the ball and let them play.
Let talents express themselves on the pitch.
A bit like street football.
Doesn't sound too difficult, but for Germany this is new territory.
Former Bayern player Mehmet Scholl received a huge backlash back in 2017
when he criticised youth coaching in Germany.
Well, we didn’t make that up, he actually said that.
And he’s right.
Studies have shown that in Spain and Portugal,
training sessions in youth academies are centered around the idea of decision-making.
Intense drills in small areas of the pitch,
the ball as much as possible at your feet.
Whereas in Germany way too much time is still spent on athletics training.
If you look at other countries.
Spain started 20 years ago playing in a smaller format.
Look how world-class they are currently.
France is playing 2 vs 2 tournaments, every weekend.
They have more success in developing outstanding dribblers.
Look at Kingsley Coman. He’s always looking for the 1 vs 1.
Why? Because he was learning it from the beginning.
And I’m convinced that the way how they teach them playing football is part of their success.
And so we start with the youngest, but also for the older guys
we have to change the content of training,
so that we have more small-sided games also in older age groups.
Training the young brain to make quick decisions.
Imagine you play 3 against 3 for one year in every training session.
The player would have to make 20,000 decisions with the ball
whereas a player in a 7 against 7 has to make just 5,000.
So, who is going to be the better footballer?
But Germany has a long way to go.
Hard to believe it was a German who invented the so-called “Funino” format.
Horst Wein promoted small-sided games for young footballers since the 1980s.
But as a field hockey coach no one took him seriously in Germany.
So he moved to Spain, where he lived in Barcelona for many years and became an icon.
Wein has inspired coaches around the world,
from Barcelona’s youth academy to Arrigo Sacchi in Italy.
No wonder Barcelona tops the list of clubs
which produce the most players for the top 5 European leagues.
Here you can see the best youth academies in Europe.
Spain and France both have 7 clubs in the top 25,
and there are only two clubs from Germany.
Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund are nowhere to be seen.
In the past you had homegrown Bavarians
but these days Germany’s biggest clubs
rarely develop outstanding players in their youth ranks.
They often buy talent from abroad, from France, the UK, even from the US.
Christian Pulisic and Gio Reyna for example were first brought into Dortmund’s U19 squads.
In the U19 teams there are 3 to 6, 7 international players.
When you’re always searching around you, you will always find a better one,
and you don’t have the time to develop the ones you have.
It’s a business model. The weak spot is that you don’t develop German talent.
Yet some German talents make it to the top. And the national team still has
players from the best clubs in the world.
Germany has a special place in football history.
German football was feared worldwide for other qualities than fancy footwork.
From 1954 to 2014 Germany never had the best players,
but they had the best team.
And one thing was certain: They knew how to win.
It’s very important that we actually are able show our German abilities,
the DNA, what we actually got respected for from other countries.
So, you know it was always like we run, fight, and all this stuff. But you really need to see it.
Germany has always been about hard work and efficiency.
Not only on the football pitch, also when it comes to everyday life and business.
After World War II Germany quickly rose to become
one of the strongest economies in the world.
The no.1 export nation.
In football they wanted to be superior, too.
They became obsessed with winning,
and it put pressure on the next generations.
Just as much he was wrong back then, the people in 2014 were wrong to consider
that we just have to move on the way we did.
This kind of feeling perpetuated itself, into winning all the time and expecting to win all the time.
If you look at the 80s, we went to every final.
A final or a semifinal without Germany didn’t happen.
We don’t have the time anymore to develop talent
because we are always in win-now mode.
The whole academies, the whole teams, the whole training staff
is always in win-now mode.
And when Germany fail to win, they’re in crisis mode.
Like back in the year 2000.
The German team crashed out of the Euros at the group stages,
the football was awful, with the average age in the squad over 31.
The German FA and its leading clubs took action.
They launched a multi-million Euro campaign to promote young talent.
The famous “reboot”.
The entire system of developing young players in Germany was revamped.
Kids were scouted all over the country,
and Bundesliga clubs had to run so-called youth performance centers.
Nowadays Germany has 57 of these centers
with many 2nd and 3rd division clubs part of the program.
And it did pay off.
Many of the 2014 World Cup winners
were products of these newly created youth performance centers.
German football reinvented itself and conquered the world.
It was right to come up with an infrastructure and possibilities that weren't there but were so badly needed.
And now it's some sort of a decadent moment, it’s working against its own interests.
So why is one of the best systems in the world now failing?
It looks like German football is obsessed with scouting and selection.
There’s selection of kids at a very, very early age.
We have a high amount of fluctuation.
If the kid is not the right kid anymore after one year,
there’s bunch of other kids waiting maybe with better physical attributes.
So, there’s no more consistency in the work and in the education.
And the standout talents, those who stay in the academies, are pampered 24/7.
The coaches organized everything very well.
They organized every step, every pass. Every move of the player was an idea of the coach.
For an academy player in Germany, life and even school are both built around training.
Breakfast in the morning? It’s all you can eat at the buffet, you’re spoiled for choice.
You hop on the shuttle bus, which you can’t miss because it will always wait to bring you to training.
You’ll never forget to bring your kit, because someone has washed and folded it for you.
Besides that, dozens of other staff members will run around you, trying to make your life easy.
Even nutritionists and video analysts have become a thing at youth level.
It’s a football bubble and you can’t really break out.
When we don’t get the kids into situations off the pitch where they need to make decisions,
tough decisions, and deal with the consequences out of it,
then we can’t expect that the players can make decisions on the pitch
and turn around a game which was 0-2.
I mean, at the end of the day, I was a big of fan of players
that just showed great football
and also they were able to not give up so fast,
they were resistant, and I think that’s what the supporters want to see.
Resilience and leadership.
It is the heart and soul of German football.
No one embodied that like Bastian Schweinsteiger.
Great victories in German football were always connected to great leaders.
Going back to 1954 and Fritz Walter.
Will we ever see a Ballon d’Or winner from Germany again?
Not very likely.
But here in Frankfurt they’re optimistic.
Here they plan their reboot 2.0
The DFB campus.
The new home of training, technology and research cost almost 200 million Euros.
It is similar to the famous Clairefontaine center near Paris
where the French national teams come together
and talented young players are taught the essence of the game.
The German FA has built its own Clairefontaine.
A think-tank to make German football competitive again.
But fancy architecture can’t hide the deep-lying issues.
We observe the football world and we see...
"Aah, Pep Guardiola is coming to Germany as a coach of Bayern München,
therefore, now we have to play Tiki-Taka."
A few years later, we see "Oh, the France system is really good at the moment, lets do it like them!"
It all starts with a universal German football philosophy besides winning.
How could this new German football philosophy look like?
New training methods and less focus on results? Is that enough?
The next generation will show us.
So what do you guys think?
Where does Germany rank among the top nations in world football?
And can they once again become a title contender?
Let us know in the comments – and hit that 'Like' button – and subscribe.