Football today

I got quite a shock when I picked my son up from his football practice yesterday, because the coach was wearing an eye patch. Oh God, I thought, has he had an accident that has left him blind in one eye? Then I took a look around – the entire team, my son included, was wearing eye patches while playing football. On the way home, my son explained that the coach wanted them to see better even with their weaker eye while playing, so he’d covered their stronger eye with a pirate’s eye patch during a practice match.

“Great, isn’t it?” said my son. I didn’t know what to say. Was it really so wonderful that a standard amateur football club in Munich was now getting even seven-year-olds to train details such as their “weak eye”? Or wasn’t it perhaps just a little bit over-ambitious? My son’s coach is a mechanical engineer. Around the world, Germans have a reputation for being able to do two things well: engineering and playing football. It is only now, however, that these two passions are being combined – the precision and methodology of mechanical engineering has reached German football.

Until 15 years ago, German football was proud of its simplicity: German football players, or so the Germans thought, won their matches by dint of their sheer determination and physical su­periority. We continued to think this even when German footballers had long ceased to win anything. The new enthusiasm for the game and the aesthetic appeal of the current German squad is 
often seen as mirroring today’s modern, diverse and colourful German nation. It is true that the national team is a shining 
example of successful integration, including within it players of Tunisian, Turkish and Bavarian origin. In fact, however, the team’s unprecedented technical and tactical proficiency is less the expression of a cosmopolitan society than down to the injection of the engineering mentality into German football. It was a bridge builder called Helmut Gross who initiated the wave of methodical thinking in German football at the end of the 1990s, when he was youth trainer at Bundesliga club VfB Stuttgart. Standing on the sidelines at my son’s football practice nowadays always makes me feel very old, as I recall the simplistic training methods that were used to teach me how to play football 30 years ago when I was a child. We all stood in a row and each took turns to take a shot at goal. These days, my son and his friends run simultaneously through sets of drills that I find too complicated even to watch. The children know what is expected of them, however – left-foot the ball to their team partner on their right, sprint, jump over three small obstacles, take possession of the ball again and then right-foot it into the back of the net – no problem for these kids!

It was hard enough for me to come to terms with being married to a woman who is a much better journalist than I am. Now I also have a son who plays football much better than I do! He really can shoot and trap the ball with either his left or right foot, and isn’t even aware of how unusual that is. Today, all of us parents were asked by my son’s coach to attend an information evening. We met in a pizzeria, where the coach explained the tactical formation to us in which the children play (tactical formation for seven-year-olds!). Suddenly, he plonked a football boot on the table right in the middle of all the pizzas to show us how we should tie our children’s shoelaces (not with a granny knot, but an Ian knot!). I went home feeling somewhat dazed – so that’s all I’m still needed for, yet even tying shoelaces is clearly something I’ve been doing wrong all these years. ▪

Ronald Reng is a sports journalist and author. The Keeper 
of Dreams, his football biography, was a bestseller. His most 
recent book is entitled Spieltage: Die andere Geschichte der Bundesliga.