A German system built for more
GERMANY’S players were still embracing on the field, some minutes away from lifting the Confederations Cup trophy, when the congratulatory messages started to pour in. They came from some of the country’s most famous, most decorated players, winners of the World Cup and the Champions League: Mesut Ozil, Toni Kroos, Jérôme Boateng and a host of others.
Some, like Kroos, expressed their delight at Germany’s defeat of Chile in St Petersburg, Russia, without words, communicating their happiness instead exclusively through emojis. Other players were only a little more garrulous. “How great is that?” asked Mats Hummels. “What a triumph, what a squad,” said Ilkay Gundogan. Thomas Muller advised his countrymen, presumably based on his own experiences, to make sure they “have fun while celebrating”.
What made the messages significant, though, was not the content so much as the context.
None of those players were on the field in Russia, waiting to take to the podium. Like Manuel Neuer, Sami Khedira, Marco Reus, Julian Weigl, André Schurrle and many others, they had not been included in Joachim Low’s squad for the competition. They were all watching, from home or from holiday, as their country proved that its football resources ran so deep, so wide, that it could triumph without them.
As Low was quick to point out as he reflected on Germany’s victory, winning the Confederations Cup, even with “such a young side,” does not mean that the Germans, the World Cup champions, are certain to retain their crown when they return to Russia next summer. Nor does the European Championship won by its under-21 team last week in Poland mean that Germany can be assured of success in the senior continental tournaments in 2020 or 2024.
Whether Germany wins on Russian soil next year, though, should not detract from the pattern its latest gilded summer has brought to the surface.
In recent years, emissaries of Belgium’s football association have been invited around the planet to advise larger, richer nations on how to develop young players. Its representatives have given lectures at St George’s Park, where England’s teams are based, and its coaches have found themselves inun- dated with offers from across the globe.
The reason is obvious: Somehow, Belgium, a country of just 11 million people, one with a generally unremarkable football pedigree and a fair-to-middling national league, has stumbled upon an astonishing production line of talent.
Every major Premier League team – apart from Arsenal – has at least one Belgian. Eden Hazard and Kevin de Bruyne are two of the most devastating attacking players in England; Toby Alderweireld, Jan Vertonghen and Vincent Kompany are among the best defenders. One of Roma’s finest players, Radja Nainggolan, is Belgian; so are one of Napoli’s, Dries Mertens, and one of Atlético Madrid’s, Yannick Ferreira Carrasco. It is a roll call that warrants further attention.
The problem, however, is that there is no great secret to Belgium’s success. There was no program put in place, no system fine-tuned, no grand plan to bring all of this together. Many of Belgium’s stars – including Hazard, Vertonghen and Alderweireld – honed their trade abroad, in France and the Netherlands. Nainggolan, like Hazard and Carrasco, has never played senior football in his homeland.
What is significant, then, about Germany’s success over the last few weeks is that it has come without the majority of its most illustrious names, that the likes of Ozil, Kroos and Muller could enjoy those triumphs only vicariously.
That German football’s strength is more than skin-deep indicates that there is, indeed, a programme that has been put in place, a system that has been fine-tuned, a grand plan enacted. That can be gauged not by those players whose gifts are so lavish that they would have succeeded regardless of their education, but by the broad standard of those behind them.
Dietrich Weise, the man who helped shape German football in the early 2000s, never believed the country lacked talent. As he told journalist Raphael Honigstein in Das Reboot, Honigstein’s book on the revival of German soccer, the issue was that too much of it was being overlooked in the search for a star. Germany’s revolution was to ensure nobody was left behind.
That is what enabled Germany to win in Russia over the past two weeks without so many of its best and brightest: not the brilliance of its outstanding individuals, but the quality of its rank and file, the depth and breadth of its talent.