No paid individual training either
Second division club FC St. Pauli is breaking new ground in youth development for a professional club and will no longer work with consultants or agencies in the “signing, extension and development processes” of underage players. The Hamburg team communicated the decision on Tuesday morning, with the club positioning itself “against the capitalization of youth football”.
“We rely on a cooperative dialogue with the players and their families and personal environment,” said St. Pauli’s NLZ boss Benjamin Liedtke in a press release. This means that in the future negotiations will no longer be conducted with advisors, but with the players themselves and their relatives – in most cases parents.
DFL publishes consultant fees: This is what the Bundesliga clubs pay
The club will also reject “commercial individual training”, i.e. units with external trainers for which the players sometimes pay privately, for youth footballers in the future. “This is not a decision against advisors in football in general,” said Liedtke, “but rather it is about putting the focus in youth football on the personal environment of the players, not on agencies and the market.”
The club wants to make young players better in the long term and a year ago presented the educational concept “Rebellution” before. The training should be more individualized. “It is thought more from the perspective of the child and young person. We look closely at the players: What are their strengths? Where is the potential? What training content and what coaching does the player need for his next development steps,” said the sporting director of the St. Pauli youth team, Fabian Seeger, at the time.
Consultant exclusion: FC St. Pauli hopes that other clubs will follow
Professional sports director Andreas Bornemann emphasized in the “SZ“That St. Pauli hopes to take a pioneering role in German football with this step, which other clubs will follow: “The topic is being discussed critically in all football committees, and most clubs have also recognized the problem.”
Multiple changes from one youth academy to the next and the one after that are not uncommon. Today’s Bayern professional Leroy Sané (27), for example, played as a teenager for Wattenscheid 09, Schalke 04 and Bayer Leverkusen before becoming a professional again at Schalke. Antonio Rüdiger (30) once went from his hometown of Berlin to Borussia Dortmund and from there again to the youth team at VfB Stuttgart. However, there is no guarantee that talent will have careers like the two examples.
Sanogo, Moukoko & Co.: top scorers in the U19 Bundesliga
Bornemann relies on “intensive and personal” exchanges with the talent, “so that there is no need to involve an external party.” This makes “sustainable development more likely”. He doesn’t want to portray consultants as the “culprits” in the process. But: “When young players observe how teammates are ensnared by advisors, it increases the pressure,” says Bornemann. This will be different at St. Pauli in the future.
To home page