DFB Talent Development - Sharpening the Focus Anew

A reporter called it the "Danube Derby," and it was an exciting match in the third division,

FC Ingolstadt 04 vs. SSV Jahn Regensburg — which is what kept me from publishing another post under my column "So schaut's aus" last Sunday. Michael Köllner's team lost 2:4 against the club from my hometown. The match was fairly even over long stretches, though the guests from Regensburg, particularly in the second half, knew how to exploit Ingolstadt's defensive weakness on the left side. In my opinion, we'll see one player from Ingolstadt's ranks at a higher-tier club next season, in the right-back position: Yannick Deichmann. The Hamburg native made a composed impression and even put his team ahead 1:0 — a defender with finishing quality...

But that's not what I wanted to report on today. Yannik Deichmann was born in 1994, and from our talent-development perspective, he's therefore not quite so important anymore.

Let's stay in Regensburg. Not with SSV Jahn Regensburg this time, but rather in the birth city of a promising "talent," Kenan Yildiz. Born in the cathedral city in 2005, the son of a Turkish father and a German mother made his first appearance for Turkey's senior national team this past Thursday. As a result, the 18-year-old striking talent may no longer play for Germany's senior national team. Niklas Füllkrug and Kevin Behrens currently occupy the central striker position in the squad, but both are already over thirty and won't be able to hunt goals for Germany for the next ten years.

Of course, players like Mathys Tel, a France-born player who's recently come up in conversation, are not an alternative — but is our country really that badly off when it comes to this type of player, the "penalty-box striker"?

One thing can be said without beating around the bush: talent development neglected this species for a period of more than ten years. Instead, the focus was placed on technically strong, possession-oriented players, with an eye chiefly on the superstars from Spain, who without question also shaped European football for over a decade. Pep Guardiola is the personified representative of this style of play. He embodied it not only as a player but implements it as a coach with near perfection. Combined with a seemingly inexhaustible source of money, he was even able to dominate what is supposedly the strongest league in the world with Manchester City this past year. Yes, with Erling Haaland he has an out-and-out striker par excellence in his ranks, but even when Haaland was out, he was able to compensate for it again and again, almost perfectly, with his technically strong midfielders, such as Phil Foden or Bernardo Silva.

We all look, or looked, on these performances with awe, similar perhaps to how people looked at the Dutch team's play with Johan Cruyff in the early 1970s. In doing so, we forgot "our own" way of chasing the round leather ball, and, with regard to talent development, the types of players needed to play this kind of football.

But did the young players all simply develop differently? Have penalty-box strikers and duel-strong players disappeared because of the changed focus in talent development?

I say NO.

"A carpenter sees nothing in everything but boards and nails," as the popular saying nicely puts it. And there's a kernel of truth to that statement.

Haven't we, in talent scouting, spent years looking out for technically strong players and made them visible at our regional bases and performance centers? Absolutely. We have.

That doesn't necessarily mean, however, that the development of other player types stopped happening. Rather, their visibility was neglected, and to a certain extent so was their development support. In the area of talent development, we can rebalance this imbalance again. However, that requires years of lead time to achieve results across the board. For the current situation and in the near future, we need to sharpen our antennae and scrutinize, with an especially eagle eye, the age groups born between 2002 and 2008. Perhaps potential national-team candidates are lying dormant at second- or third-division clubs, or have already become visible and we simply haven't paid them enough attention, or did so too late — as in the case of Kenan Yildiz.

But perhaps we sometimes don't place the necessary trust in these players, as examples like Bernhard Winkler, or Stefan Kunz and Martin Max — both called up far too late — go to show.

I look forward to addressing another topic in talent development with you next week under my column "So schaut's aus." Until then! Stay healthy, and always a good ball!