Watzke is absolutely right. We have technically excellent players in the national team, such as Sane, Brandt and Havertz, but they appear lethargic, pomagy and without the will to win on the pitch. Also in the youth field. The technical and tactical training is good, but no one wants to surpass themselves and push themselves to their limits.
Youth players have to overcome hurdles. When victory, defeat and goals are abolished, hurdles are also reduced. This is poison for personal development. As a little boy, I would come home completely sad and distraught after losing a game, even if it was just a sports festival or playground tournament at school. I also cried in the stadium when my club lost (2nd Bundesliga; was at every home game). Football is love and suffering, both for the fans in the stands and for every player on the pitch. No matter how old, no matter what league, no matter how professionally the sport is played. Football is suffering, love and emotion. How can there be emotions if victory, defeat and goals are abolished? That’s boring. When should you celebrate? When are you sad?
The main point is that players should no longer be drafted based on their physical advantages, but rather on their talent.
It is currently the case that most coaches, based on their own career aspirations, set up the teams in the junior leagues to do as well as possible.
However, since at the junior level you usually have considerable physical advantages after just a few months more in this world, many youth coaches do not recruit based on “talent” and disposition, but rather based on the highest chance of winning.
In addition, due to relegation pressure in the junior leagues, player decisions are often made that lead to relegation. For example, U17 players are often taken into the U16, for which they are still eligible to play, in order to avoid relegation, but this damages the development of the U17 player. who actually needs to gain experience at a higher level and that of the U16 player who was replaced because he simply cannot play.
At the moment it is often not based on development potential, but rather on current performance and this hinders the development of many physical late developers and, above all, often prevents technically strong dribblers because they only fail through a lot of game practice and fail at dribbling, 1v1 etc . learn, but they are not currently given this time to fail in German football.
By abolishing promotion and relegation in the NLZ areas, there is still a championship, but you can only line up based on potential and not based on how best to wall yourself up to stay in the league or how to physically dominate your opponents in order to maintain your chances of winning the championship.
In addition, at the younger levels you want to play a lot more on small pitches because then each player has significantly more phases of ball possession and with more phases of ball possession players get better faster, by the way also and especially in dribbling and 1v1 and apart from Musiala and Ouedraogo it takes a long time nothing at the DFB.
It’s all well and good that the pressure should be taken off the talents – I don’t think it makes sense, because in the professional field you’re exposed to this pressure one way or another. This doesn’t fix the problem, it just relocates it.
What is a problem, however, is that there is no longer any promotion and relegation, all clubs that are currently not so well represented in professional football will be deprived of an important basis in the long term through good talent work to provide a higher-class first team. That means that there is no longer even the theoretical possibility that a bigger talent will play for a more regional club and there, for example, be promoted to the 3rd or 4th league.
At the same time, do we expect these talents, who are supposed to develop without pressure, to make the difference in pressure situations?
Why is it possible that a Musiala developed like this in England, but in Germany he would probably have fallen through the cracks because he doesn’t fit into the F pattern?
Whether it was Basler or Scholl, they said that we were focusing on the wrong things in our training of young talent.
Are we surprised that we hardly have any creativity in our offspring anymore? No wonder, you just have to stubbornly implement the trainer’s instructions, otherwise you will be replaced by another “yes-man and head-nopper” who plays well and as a team.
Currently, France is a seemingly endless source of top talent and players. Why doesn’t the big DFB take a look at what they’re doing differently? Why not hire youth coaches or coordinators from France and try to make these systems usable for us?
No, with us every bit of individuality is nipped in the bud because it then becomes more difficult to control the players.
The “successes” cannot be dismissed out of hand, we have not been able to provide even a German MS for years. No proper DMs, no RV/LVs, IVs work somewhat, but even goalkeepers are getting tight now.
We have put ourselves in a situation where being a German national player is no longer a sign of quality.
But now we are promoting the idea that “being there is everything”. We’re going to a home European Championship and we’re not even in the extended circle of favorites with the home advantage.
What the DFB is doing with the innovations reminds me of the nonsense in our image system. If a task was too “difficult” in an exam, it is counted as an extra, so that the average is just a lie.
The performance principle is increasingly being overridden. Why make an effort when it’s enough.