LOCKERROOM:Do the League of Ireland people have the imagination to begin producing the sort of players German, Dutch or Spanish scouts might like?
AH! SPRING is nigh and the premiership is in full swing and Darren Bent is worth €28 million. And the crisis in the careers of so many Irish pros in England is going unnoticed as everybody buckles up for the mayhem of the second half of a Premier League season.
By and large the movers and sheikhs of English football have forgotten what they did last summer. We don’t mention the banshees keening which followed the unfortunate incident of the golden generation being fed into the shredder by Germany.
The anguished hand-wringing. The why? why? why? of it all.
In Germany, meanwhile, the young team which had achieved so much came home and were chastised about the dangers of complacency. A lot done, more to do as Fianna Fáilers say when casually sinking a putt, or indeed an entire country.
The Germans not only brought a barely post pubescent team to South Africa, but they broke free of the shackles of World Cup cliche. Their nimble hammerings of England and Argentina had us asking if anything sinister had happened to the dull, disciplined football which the Germans traditionally applied to tournaments like a wet blanket.
The Germans though are, as we have suspected for many years, not like the rest of us at all. Be it football, the best spots on the beach or world domination they just set about doing things differently.
Germany won the European Championship in 1996 and a year later Borussia Dortmund won the Champions League and Schalke 04 won the Uefa Cup. A nice insulating layer of fatty success with which to insulate any normal nation through a few thin, cold years.
The Germans got beaten in the quarter finals of the 1998 World Cup, however, and began to notice something funny about their game. Not funny ha ha. Funny peculiar. In 1992, 17 per cent of the players in the Bundesliga’s two divisions were foreign. By 1997 this had risen to 34 per cent. German clubs were fat with TV money and it was easier to buy in than to produce. By 2002, foreign players made up 60 per cent of the Bundesliga workforce. The irony of Germany being overrun by foreigners! (An apology at this point to regular readers for the unprecedented use of facts in this column. The usual, generalised guff will return next week.)
Then towards the end of the 2002 season KirchMedia the TV company which had bankrolled the whole cavalcade of footy mediocrity went kaput (good, eh?). With their platoons of highly paid but ordinary players German clubs found themselves being pushed towards the cliffs of insolvency. England got Gary Lineker to make a TV programme which was a lament for the game.
In fussball nation they just produced a plan: 121 National talent centres for 10-17 year olds to learn the technical side of the game, two coaches in each centre. The emphasis, as the old striker Horst Hrubesch says, is on “fun and fascination”. As of July 2002 Youth Academies became a requirement for any first or second tier club hoping to get a licence.
They put their new fangled money where their stern teutonic mouth was and spent half a billion euro on the academy system. Each club must have a specified number of coaches and scouts, a set number of floodlit pitches, a set number of teams with set numbers of players. And those players must receive an education in the traditional sense while learning football.
Most importantly, the clubs must identify and define a visible football philosophy, a way to play which percolates down through the club and if they are smart, that philosophy will fit in with the way the national teams play. The academies have been in existence for a relatively short time but last summer 19 of Germany’s World Cup panel were graduates.
Bayern Munich, of course, have had huge success with their youth factory and more than half their first team usually features academy players. This year, though, Borussia Dortmund have virtually wrapped up the league already with a team which features five academy graduates and has several others bubbling under impatiently. The latest wonder wunderkind is Mario Goetz who had to be withdrawn in a league match recently because it was feared his precocious genius was going to draw a few frustrated kicks from the senior pros he was embarrassing.
At Dortmund they reckon (in GAA style) Goetz is good alright but 17-year-old Marvin Duksch in the queue behind him may be even better. (Reminds me of the old story about life at Sunderland when Niall Quinn rounded up the Drumaville syndicate lads to throw a few bob into the bucket at the start of his chairmanship. One day they sat down with Roy Keane to discuss Roy’s transfer needs. The most pressing was a desire to buy goalkeeper Craig Gordon for €10.5 million. The lads suffered a bout of collective hypertension. Silence descended until a half hopeful voice asked, “is the Minor lad not any good?” )
A few years ago Borussia took the cash for selling David Odonkor to Spain and used a chunk to invest further in their youth set up. Home grown players attract crowds and Dortmund average more than 75,000 per home game. Now back to Gary Lineker.
Take Christopher Buchtmann, plucked judiciously from the Borussia Dortmund youth system by Liverpool in 2008. Oddly Liverpool seemed to know what they were doing. He became a key member of the squad that claimed the FA Youth Cup that season.
Along with that FA Youth Cup adventure Buchtmann starred in Germany’s run to win the European U-17 championships that year. He was named after the tournament in the top 10 stars of the future by Uefa. A two-footed player, he crossed from a free kick to create an equaliser for the Germans against the Netherlands, in a match they won 2-1 to claim the trophy. He also laid on a goal in the 2-0 semi-final victory against Italy, but his biggest moment came against England when he provided three stunning assists in a 4-0 thrashing of the English which was in effect a chronicle of a senior thrashing foretold.
That same summer Rafa Benitez brought in one Rodolfo Borrell from Barcelona to overhaul the Anfield youth system. Borrell had discovered Cesc Fabregas as a 10 year-old playing for Mataro and had helped guide Leo Messi to superstardom. At Liverpool he found only chaos and announced it would take two years to put the youth academy right.
“The Under 18s had no centre forward, no balance, no tactical level, no understanding of the game.” What a shocking indictment of a club with Liverpool’s ambition. Buchtmann seemed to catch that strange bug foreign players are afflicted with at many English clubs, a mixture of depression and the yuppie flu. A year ago Liverpool decided they had no use for one of the top 10 prospects in the world and let him go to Fulham for €117,000. Fulham pronounced he was their future, their sun, their moon, their stars and then sold him onto FC Cologne last summer. Back in Germany he was placed into the first squad as the second youngest member (the youngest, Reinhold Yabo, made his debut last week) and will be given his chance after a run in the reserves designed to re-acquaint him with German football and rebuild his confidence.
With the German Under-19 squad he has continued to thrive. It will be no surprise to see him in Brazil in 2014 as part of the German squad.
The point here is the transfer window in England has almost shut and there is virtually nobody in the Ireland squad whose career wouldn’t benefit from a transfer but Kevin Kilbane is the only player to have got one. Every year in the Premier League the dance floor becomes more and more crowded with foreign players.
And yet here we devote ourselves almost exclusively to developing players to go down the mines of the English game. It was 1997 when Duffer and Robbie began breaking through in England – 14 years ago. It was 1992 when Mark Kennedy became a sensation at Millwall, launching a career which would bring him to Liverpool three years later as the most expensive teenage footballer in British history. Do we have the imagination to begin producing the sort of players German, Dutch or Spanish scouts might like? To turn our slightly bedraggled League of Ireland into a petri dish where we might experiment with, dare we say it, continental styles, where the players below the League of Ireland grew up looking further afield than England.
If not, we are just training kids to play the triangle for the orchestra upstairs on the metaphor we call the Titanic.
