German talents who were destined for greatness are now stagnating
ermany have reached the semi-finals or final of the previous five major tournaments, and in Rio de Janeiro two summers ago they finally lifted the biggest prize of all for the first time since unification. You’d think this is a side unburdened by pressure with nothing to prove. And yet it was only a few weeks ago that Oliver Bierhoff, the team’s general manager, told the nation’s premier football publication: “Having success at the Euros would help incredibly.” He added: “It would be very important, and certainly what the fans crave, if we could go back to talking about football.”
Bierhoff had just been asked by Kicker what needs to be done to restore faith in the country’s favourite sport, after the murky (and as of yet unresolved) corruption scandal surrounding the 2006 World Cup bid, which forced Wolfgang Niersbach to step down as the president of the German FA.
Bierhoff’s answer was revealing. In Germany, the fortunes of the national team are always imbued with symbolic meaning. Success and failure are both seen as emblematic of larger issues: the state of the German game, the future of the Bundesliga or even the country’s political and cultural climate. And so Bierhoff did not reply that football’s tarnished image could be repaired by conducting a thorough investigation of the affair. No, he said that Joachim Löw’s team must do well in France.
If he’s right, then there’s a lot more pressure on the side at Euro 2016 than you’d think, as the bribery scandal is just one of many clouds hanging over the German game. In fact, there are so many that perhaps only another piece of silverware could steer talk back to football.
Barely three years ago, Germany was widely considered the epitome of football cool, and the model to follow. People admired all things Teutonic, from the country’s youth development to its terrace atmospheres; from swashbuckling players to charismatic coaches such as Jurgen Klopp; from clubs owned by their members instead of foreign businessmen to a league so competitive it had produced five different champions in 10 seasons. It seemed natural that the most coveted manager on the planet, Pep Guardiola, would choose a Bundesliga team to join rather than a Premier League club.
Now, a couple of years later, little of the above can still be said. Klopp has moved to Liverpool and Pep will soon be at Manchester City, where Kevin De Bruyne, 2015 Footballer of the Year in Germany, already plies his trade.
At the same time, German talents who were destined for greatness are stagnating (Mesut Özil, Mario Götze, Marco Reus) or even in decline (Andre Schurrle, Julian Draxler, Christoph Kramer). This development or lack thereof – along with the puzzling fact that Germany’s fabled youth setup has been unable to produce one striker capable of replacing Miroslav Klose – goes a long way towards explaining why the World Cup champions stumbled unconvincingly through their Euro 2016 qualifying campaign.
Even those of Löw’s players who are in form have given cause for concern. In April, Borussia Dortmund announced that their captain, Mats Hummels, had put in a formal transfer request and wished to join Bayern Munich. This sparked a heated debate and led Der Spiegel, a noted political magazine, to proclaim “the beginning of the end of the Bundesliga” on its website.
What sounds like hyperbole may not be totally far-fetched. While the Premier League has seen one of the most entertaining and satisfying title races in recent memory, the Bundesliga has become so predictable that it’s almost a monopoly. Bayern Munich have won four league titles on the trot, averaging a 16-point lead over second place in that period. Dortmund have just had the best season in the club’s history, collecting 78 points from their 34 games and outscoring the champions, and still they never had a serious chance to overtake Bayern. There is now a school of thought that this trend won’t be reversed until German football sacrifices its sacred cow: the once-admired 50+1 rule, which prevents outside investors from gaining control of a club. The current rule discourages investors from putting serious cash into some of Germany’s numerous sleeping giants – clubs such as Hamburg or Cologne. The ruling is seen by some as prohibitive for a league that’s making great efforts to sharpen its profile in foreign markets. Two years ago, after the national team’s triumph in Brazil, the Bundesliga jumped at the chance to style itself the ‘league of the world champions’. But you don’t see many of those when Augsburg meet Freiburg or Hoffenheim take on Mainz. “How much backwater can the Bundesliga tolerate?” asked newspaper Die Welt as early as last summer, when unfashionable Ingolstadt and Darmstadt won promotion (two clubs that subsequently steered clear of relegation). And so the national team is, once again, going into a big tournament not entirely free of excessive expectations. Many eyes, German and foreign, will be judging what has happened to the game’s promised land – and whether it’s still, as the Daily Mirror declared in the wake of the tournament in Brazil, “cool to be German”. It would be a lot easier to answer this question if the Bundesliga could soon describe itself as the ‘league of the world and European champions’. Over to you, Mr. Löw.