Dejected Germany players walked off the pitch after their 0-2 loss to England in the last 16 of the Euro 2020.
LAST month, Toni Kroos posted a “short and painless” update to his Instagram feed, confirming that he had decided to heed the honey-soaked call of Julian Nagelsmann, Germany’s relatively new coach, and rescind his international retirement.
He would, he wrote, return to the national team – after three years away – and be available for selection for this summer’s European Championship.
Given how torrid Germany’s preparations for the tournament have been, it was a welcome boost: The cavalry was arriving, albeit, this being Kroos, at a gentle, unruffled sort of pace.
There was something about the caption, though, that did not quite fill you with confidence.
“Why?” Kroos asked, rhetorically, of his decision to return.
“Because I was asked by the national coach, I’m up for it and I’m sure that a lot more is possible with the team at the European Championships than most people believe!”
It was not exactly a marketing slogan to stir the soul. As a representation of exactly where Germany is, three months out from a tournament it will host, though, it is hard to beat:
Julian Nagelsmann and his team will carry the hopes of the host nation into this summer’s Euros.
Germany 2024: It probably won’t be as bad as you think.
The reasons for the angst are clear. When he was appointed in September, Nagelsmann became Germany’s third coach in three years. Joachim Loew, the man who had led the country to victory in the 2014 World Cup, had departed after Germany’s forlorn exit from the 2021 European Championship, his team falling to a limp defeat against England in the last 16.
Loew was replaced by his former assistant, Hansi Flick, the warm, likable coach who had always had the ear of the players and – as is always the case in these situations – had been heralded as the true architect of the golden age.
Flick had won a domestic and European treble at Bayern Munich. His appointment was, it seemed, a no-brainer.
That did not work either. At the World Cup in Qatar, Germany exited at the group stage, the victim of an admittedly unlikely set of results involving Japan’s beating Spain and the transit of Venus through Aquarius.
It was the second World Cup in a row in which Germany had fallen at the first hurdle.
Flick struggled on for a few months, and then contrived to lose three games in a row. His last act was a 4-1 defeat in a friendly against Japan in September.
A few hours later, he became the first man in almost a century to be fired as Germany coach. Nagelsmann, two years after succeeding Flick at Bayern Munich, now found himself doing the same for the national team.
In truth, the change has made little impact. Nagelsmann won his first game against the United States, a green shoot of hope amid all the despair.
He drew with Mexico. And then he lost, in quick succession, to Turkey and Austria.
His last two games before he names his squad for the finals are against France and Holland, two of the favourites for this summer’s crown.
Beyond restoring Kroos – a player Nagelsmann has described as the best in “bypassing the opposition” in Europe – it is not entirely clear how he intends to arrest the slide.
Kai Havertz played at leftback in the fall. Nagelsmann has already decreed that will not be happening again.
Germany defender Jonathan Tah fights for the ball with France’s Olivier Giroud during the friendly on March 23. The Germans overcame the French 2-0 in a confidence-boosting win ahead of hosting Euro 2024. — AFP
More than a dozen players who were involved against Austria and Turkey have been ignored this time around, among them the experienced Bayern midfielder Leon Goretzka.
In their place have come four players from Stuttgart, one of the Bundesliga’s in-form sides, who have one international appearance between them.
These are not signs that suggest Germany has a settled vision. There is a reason people think this summer might, despite what Kroos says, go quite badly.
Even more mystifying, though, is quite how Germany slumped so far. This was, after all, the nation that only a decade ago seemed to have perfected youth development as an industrial process.
Germany’s teams served as a smooth-running production line of talent. Borussia Dortmund even had an actual machine, the Footbonaut, for that purpose.
And it was also the country that was home to the ideology, the approach to the game, that would quickly become not just best practice but the default setting across much of Europe.
Germany, through Ralf Rangnick and Juergen Klopp and Thomas Tuchel, developed gegenpressing and the eight-second rule.
Germany was the future. Germany had solved the puzzle. Germany would no longer be susceptible to the same cycles of boom and bust, of coaching changes and individual scapegoats, as everyone else.
But while that is precisely where we are, how we got here is not clear. The most common explanation, of course, is that the fabled German reboot was an illusion, that the generation that won the 2014 World Cup was just a happy accident – either a confluence of complex and unrelated factors or a single bolt of lightning, neither of which can be controlled by humans.
Germany, fooled by their success, grew complacent, only to discover that they did not have the answers after all.
A member of the public poses with the European Championship trophy during the trophy tour in Stuttgart. — Reuters
There is a tendency, too, to wonder if the travails of Germany the team are somehow a manifestation of the country’s football culture as a whole: infighting among executives, a lack of innovation at clubs, a lack of direction and leadership and planning at pretty much every level.
Both theories have merit, and both have appeal: We like nice, rounded narratives. Neither quite explains the issue.
Germany, after all, may not have as many good players as they did a decade ago, but they still have plenty. If a clear strategic vision at executive level was important for teams in international football, Italy would not have four World Cups.
Given the failure of successive Germany coaches – and dozens of players, some old, some young, some creative, some industrious – to get to the root of the problem, though, it seems increasingly clear that the problem is likely structural. It is worth considering if Germany’s system, so long their strength, is now its weakness.
The percussive, high-octane style first ushered into vogue by Rangnick, Klopp and the rest is now the default in the Bundesliga.
It is how all of Germany’s players are raised. It is, though, complex: Each team will spend hundreds of hours fine-tuning their pressing strategies, adapting them to their needs and their resources.
The sort of time required to make it work, though, is not available in international football; it is why the international game tends to be less slick, less smooth and to appear, at times, less refined than their club counterpart.
At the same time, asking players to change habits that have been inculcated in them since they were children for the sake of a few weeks every other summer is likely to end in failure.
And so Germany finds themselves caught in a bind: an unbalanced but nonetheless gifted squad, unable to do what they know but unable to do anything else, too, tasked with meeting the lofty expectations set by previous generations.
Loew and Flick could not pick their way through that conundrum. Nagelsmann has only three months to figure out a solution, and the early indications are not encouraging.
Perhaps Kroos is right, and that is the best he can hope for: that whatever happens, it is not quite as bad as you think. — NYT
