Both Germany and Italy endured a turbulent few days last week after poor performances at the weekend: the Germans lost at home to Japan 4-1 and eventually sacked coach Hansi Flick, while Italy drew modestly 1-1 with North Korea. Macedonia.
Both won on Tuesday night – Germany beat France and Italy edged past Ukraine to get Euro 2024 qualifying back on track – but we still have to hear the usual array of knee-jerk, meaningless reactions. They range from pretentious nonsense about the general decline of society (Especially in Germany) to endless worry about the quality of youth development and the denial of opportunities to local players due to “cheap foreign imports” (mostly in Italy).
Actually, it’s really simple. In the vast majority of cases, there are three reasons why a team loses a match: Either the opponent has better players (which was not the case for Germany or Italy on Saturday night, and was not the case most of the time they played the match). field), the coach makes bad decisions (or his team doesn’t implement them, for whatever reason) and chance, luck or randomness. that it always A combination of these three.
You can’t control chance, luck, and randomness. You Can Change of national team coaches. For different reasons, Germany and Italy did so.
– Stream on ESPN+: LaLiga, Bundesliga, more (US)
As for having better players, certainly if they are better than the competition, that may make up for bad coaching decisions or bad luck and coincidence. And when you’re talking about a national team, there’s really only one way (especially now that FIFA has cracked down on questionable switches between countries… remember this?) To get better players: develop them.
You can’t have it, you have to grow it. Hence the focus on youth development. While this is undoubtedly important, there are some basic facts here. For starters, it’s a slow burn. Pumping resources into youth training and infrastructure, redesigning training manuals, de-emphasizing results at the expense of development – all of these are worthwhile, but if you stumble in the World Cup qualifiers, you won’t be able to fix your team for at least another two cycles, meaning eight years or more.
What’s more – at least when it comes to mature, advanced football nations with money, like Germany and Italy – they are very close to ‘best practice’ anyway, and have been so for a long time. Football associations are constantly exchanging knowledge and copying each other.
Assuming it existed at all, gone are the days when Italian kids spent hours standing working on defensive tactical positioning, Portuguese kids dribbled endlessly and aimlessly, German kids piled on and ran forever in straight lines and English kids just piled on. The ball is in play for the powerful striker who needed a shave before his 14th birthday. Everyone is more sophisticated, everyone is doing – mostly – the same things. In any case, everyone tends to lose control of kids – at least those who are good at playing for the national team one day – when they reach 14, because they are usually in the club’s academy by then. then.
In other words, you could probably do things better (you can always do things better), but you wouldn’t really do things differently.
The other big fallacy concerns foreign players and playing time. The idea is that talented local youngsters don’t develop into talented professional stars because their path is blocked by foreign players: they don’t get a chance to play, so they don’t improve.
For national team coaches who have a very limited pool of players from which to choose, this theory seems smart (to some extent), and yes, it is true that Serie A and the German Bundesliga are ranked first and fourth respectively in the Bundesliga. The 2022 CIES Football Observatory study charts the percentage of minutes played by foreign players. However, there are two fundamental problems with this argument.
Firstly, if you are a talented young man who cannot get on the field for whatever reason, you can always move abroad and prove your worth. Even if you are a talented professional player, you may want to move abroad anyway to play for a bigger and better club. Fourteen players in the German national team and eleven players in the Italian national team either play for foreign clubs or have done so in the past. So using domestic league minutes as a benchmark is ridiculous.
The other issue is that if we believe that having too many foreign players in domestic leagues is detrimental to your national team, how does one explain England? The Premier League has the second highest percentage of foreign players, yet in the past three major tournaments, this English team has been as strong as any in the FA’s 150-year history. Oh, and they’re very good at youth level too, having won a host of trophies in recent years: the U-17 World Cup in 2017, the U-19 European Championship in 2022, the U-20 World Cup in 2017, and the U-19 European Championship 21 years old last summer. . Sure they have modernized facilities and spent more on youth development than developing countries, but so do Germany and Italy.
Could competing for playing time actually make players better? And getting to know top professionals from every corner of the world gives players a better understanding of the modern game, while helping them grow? I think we know the answer to that.
The not-so-exciting truth is that generations of talent come in cycles, and nature plays as big a role as nurture. You can – and should – build a luxury, sophisticated pipeline and should make it as big as possible to ensure you don’t miss out on Mbappe and Haaland in the future, but there’s no guarantee that Mbappe or Haaland will flow through it. There is an element of randomness to global talent that no amount of training and infrastructure can conjure up from scratch.
Does this mean that world-class players are born, not made? Not quite, because you still need to discover talent (and thus the size of the pipeline) and create an environment in which they can develop, and if that core talent (not just physical, but mental as well) isn’t there, there’s only so much you can do.
Consider Barcelona’s impressive academy, La Masia. We were all frustrated with the team that included Lionel Messi, Xavi, Andres Iniesta, Sergio Busquets and other homegrown youngsters who helped set Europe on fire. But if La Masia is truly the secret ingredient, how is it possible that in the 11 years between Busquets’ debut in 2008 and Ansu Fati’s debut in 2019, he was the most talented academy graduate to have – with all due respect – actually made an impact on the first team? Sergi Roberto?
Or cast your mind back to Iceland.
In 2016, they reached the quarter-finals of the European Championship, beating Roy Hodgson’s England on the way. Two years later they qualified for the World Cup. Documentaries and case studies have been produced extolling the genius of a small nation of 380,000 being able to reach such heights. Commentators praised the Icelandic Football Association’s brilliance in building all-weather pitches across the island and adopting the most advanced training techniques.
Well, they haven’t qualified for anything since 2018, and likely won’t for the foreseeable future, considering they sit second in their Euro 2024 qualifying group and have already lost to the likes of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Luxembourg. Their FIFA world ranking, which reached 18th, is now 67th, behind Cape Verde.
What happened to all-weather pitches and progressive training? Supposedly they are still there. Presumably, that’s not what made them so good, but the presence of players like Gylfi Sigurdsson, Aron Gunnarsson, Birkir Bjarnason and others. They’re all gone, and the people who replaced them are no good. This is not because youth development in Iceland now sucks, but simply because these are once-in-a-lifetime talents (by Icelandic standards) and you can’t plan for them regularly rolling off the assembly line. You simply have to be ready when they show up.
Germany and Italy, for a number of reasons – some of which are common to the two countries and some of which are not – have gone through a difficult stage recently. It is useful to understand why in a rational and thoughtful way. Ideally, without the pessimistic reactions and knee-jerk reactions we are subjected to in commentators.
