Hertha’s youth boss Pablo Thiam: “Want to win back Berlin”

In the club since summer 2021

After 13 years in the service of VfL Wolfsburg, Pablo Thiam took over the post of youth manager at Hertha BSC last summer. Almost nine months after taking office, the 48-year-old looks to the future and talks, among other things, about his strategic goals, economic constraints and the sometimes unavoidable loss of top talent.

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“We want to win Berlin back – in scouting, in recruitment. We want to show how we work and be transparent about it,” announced the former Bundesliga professional in an interview with “Markische Allgemeine Zeitung” at. The club in the capital was often said to have “a kind of unapproachability” when it came to youth work, and Hertha now wants to “strengthen football in Berlin overall through cooperation” and benefit from it in the long term. “Because the better the players on the Berlin market are in general and the better the exchange between the clubs, the more we get out of it at the end of the day. What I don’t want to see is a coach trying to recruit players or their parents after the game. That’s not professional. The first step has to come from us, those responsible, to the other club. There has to be so much respect. It doesn’t matter what others do,” says Thiam.

You will only be able to harvest the first fruits of the work you have started in the junior division. “The structures are in place after one to one and a half years. Content such as game conception takes two or three years. But it’s a process, like open-heart surgery. The good thing is: we are already successful and we already have the know-how in the club. Good work has been done here for a long time. For too long we have only used knowledge selectively. I want everyone in the club to benefit from the findings. From the U9 to the U23 and in all areas.”

In the current squad of head coach Felix Magath there are currently eight players who come from their own youth academy – including Kevin-Prince Boateng, Maximilian Mittelstädt and Márton Dárdai. Thiam, who made the leap to the pros exactly 30 years ago at 1. FC Köln and who played a total of 310 Bundesliga games for FC, VfB Stuttgart, Bayern Munich and VfL Wolfsburg during his active career, also talks about it in the interview the growing difficulties of retaining top talent in one’s own ranks.

Herthas Thiam: “Luca Netz has decided to make more money”

Only FC Bayern can do the latter, “if they want to,” said Thiam. A case like that of 18-year-old Luca Netz, who decided against Hertha last summer and in favor of a transfer to Borussia Mönchengladbach, cannot be avoided in the future either. At the time, the left-back was the most expensive player in his age group to move from one Bundesliga club to another.

While the youngster stated the desire for more playing time as the decisive factor in his decision to change, Thiam refers to the financial component. “Luca Netz had a coach here who put his trust in him and he could have gone his own way here. But he chose to make more money. These are purely economic decisions. (…) On the other hand, you shouldn’t forget, and that’s also a credit to the academy, that Hertha collected a lot of money for it. For some clubs it is the main business model. Of course, the top priority should be for the boys to play in the Olympic Stadium. But the football business is also a business. At some point you have to make trade-offs.”

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