Sanctimonious Lip Service

World Cup Group-Stage Exit for Our Women's Team and Sanctimonious Lip Service!

Do the DFB and the professional clubs running the academies not want to see this, or are they simply unable to?

After the DFB women's team's group-stage exit, the usual mechanisms kick in — criticism of the coaching staff, the lack of a clear playing idea in the team's offensive and defensive play, and the too one-sided development of our talents, as for example the former professional player and ZDF expert Kathrin Lehmann made clear in her statement:

“The young generation coming up is polished, well-schooled, and has video analysts, and no longer has to make decisions of their own. They're told in advance: where do you need to shift. It's always said they've run out of ideas. They don't learn it anymore. I call on everyone: go back outside, play street football, go kick a ball around, that's where you learn it.”

ZDF commentator Claudia Neumann also already criticized this during the match: “The ability to react to adversity is not well developed, and that's a serious shortcoming of this team.”

“I believe that the golden generation who won the title 20 years ago was clearly more used to dealing with resistance than today's young women and men.”

In my very first post, “Do the Pitches Where Tomorrow's Talents Develop Really Look Like This?” I had already touched on this topic. But in my view, it's not enough to simply say, “…go back outside, play street football…” Who is actually out on the street or on the pitches these days? Social change isn't so easily reversed!

The sports scientist and health expert Prof. Dr. Ingo Froböse likewise urges our politicians to attach greater importance to sport. “The decline just keeps going. We shouldn't be surprised if we're soon regarded as a developing nation in sport,” the former top athlete wrote on Facebook.

When it comes to football in Germany, there are several signs suggesting that other nations are considerably more sport-minded than we are. Granted, demographic trends don't necessarily suggest we're a young, up-and-coming, active nation. But our population density and our love of football ought to add up to more than our senior national teams being eliminated in the group stages of World Cups.

So what can we do?

For one thing, politicians are called upon to give sport a significantly higher standing in society. Students should be supported not only at PCs but also in gyms and on sports fields. That certainly isn't going to fail because of children's motivation!

That would let politicians/society lay a foundation for a more athletic, and for that matter healthier, population.

Beyond that, though, the associations — with the DFB at the top — and the clubs are called upon too! If we really want to achieve better talent development in German football, then sanctimonious lip service isn't enough.

Joti Chatzialexiou, the national teams' sporting director in particular, needs to follow up his words with actions!

I can't share his assessment that the wheels are turning too slowly.

We're actually well organized when it comes to talent development (scouting), yet we still treat it as a stepchild. Scouting young players in the U11, U13, and U15 range is a first step that the DFB has been implementing since 2003 with its 366 regional training centers, but it hasn't been thought through to the end.

On its talent-development website, the association states that the regional-center training gives talents a further high-level training session for special development — but is that really the case? Can the regional-center coaches actually deliver on the individual support they advertise? I'd say no!

This weekly, additional training session is a platform on which we get to see our current talents playing in a concentrated setting and can give them a few pointers where needed. But real development, let alone growth, has to happen through more frequent practice in free time and with the club teams. Ideally, kids would be given the chance to kick a ball every day! And not permanently under maximum performance pressure, as is the case, for example, in the DFB's 56 elite academies.

But how? One wrong path that reveals the hypocrisy of our associations and academies is, for example, the one that thoroughly wears out and uses up our youth coaches! At many academies, full-time jobs are paid at mini-job rates. And in some cases, not even reliably!

The clubs that run the academies, on the other hand, spend millions on professionals and their coaches. Incidentally, these are also the clubs where, for the most part, our talents can't be given the time to establish themselves. I admit there are exceptions.

In the clubs where amateur football is played, and which form the foundation of our football nation, there's hardly anything more that can be done. Volunteers put in more commitment than one could reasonably expect anyway, at a time when both parents typically go to work. Couldn't this commitment be specifically supported?

I'd say yes! But why should amateur clubs operate any differently than our academy-running clubs?

Coaches of the senior teams are regularly compensated for their efforts and duly recognized! Youth coaches, like the coaching and staff teams at the academies, are given far too little recognition.

Of course, broad-based training for youth coaches is a basic requirement! This is where the DFB needs to step up! At present, though, the association is acting far too hesitantly and with far too few ideas!

But youth development at the academies, too, is allowed to take new paths! Our top talents should be given more personal responsibility, so they can also show it on the pitch. In my view, though, it isn't helpful to expose kickers, already at U11 or U13 level, to leisure-time stress and performance pressure through long journeys to the academies. A genuine talent should bring the ambition themselves, and what's needed then is a certain lightness in order to grow.

What if, in this age group, we organized regional-center and “scouting player” tournaments on a somewhat broader basis? Set the whole thing up in a much more permeable and less rigid way, to take the performance pressure out of it? Scouting and fun are, after all, far more effective in these developmental years than performance pressure and leisure-time stress! In my view, that would foster enjoyment of football, increase the visibility of talents, and encourage self-reliant “prospective pros.”

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!