The German performance was that of a highly
integrated team with many individually gifted players. Right from the start it
was clear that they all played together as a team. That no single player
however gifted would be allowed to dominate proceedings in any game. In other
words they all played for each other and used their individual gifts
unselfishly in a team spirit. In this the basic philosophy of manager Joachim
Loew was only too evident. Over the last decade Germany’s football performances
had all too often been poor. Other nations like Spain and Italy had surpassed
them and there were clearly lessons to be learned. Germany had the players, no
doubt about that, only they played as individuals first and foremost. There was
no-one perhaps who exemplified this more than the rugged and gifted Bastien Schweinsteiger.
He played as an individual within the
German team but not necessarily for the
German team. In short the essence of German failing was that their players
didn’t play collectively and it was this I think that Loew came to realise when
he was given the task of creating a new national side.
His philosophy was simply this. That the
individual gifts of the players he selected had to be harnessed for the purpose
of team endeavour and that once they played as a collective entity, for each
other and as a team unit, only then could their individual talents and skills be
freed up to shine. Put simply, they could shine as individuals for the team
purpose. Schweinsteiger is again the perfect example to come out of Germany’s
victorious team. There was none of the old individualism so apparent in earlier
years. In the final against Argentina, as in earlier games, he was all over the
pitch, defending, attacking and helping his colleagues in a remarkably
unselfish performance that quite frankly more than entitled him to win the
Golden Ball Award for being the player of the tournament.
It was this collective team philosophy that Loew brought to the German national side when
he took over its management. It was first introduced by him in the creation of
a German Under 21 squad some years back, five of its players appearing in
Germany’s 2014 team for Brazil. They were taught early on to play together for the youth team. To
initially harness their talents for its collective
purpose. And in the years that followed he carefully, patiently, selected
talented players whose skills could be harnessed for a collective purpose. It
was a long very deliberate process that went on over seven, eight years or more
of building
a team with a very definite end in mind by a patient, highly intelligent
manager who knew exactly what he wanted and where he was going.
The highly specialized team he created is a
product of his own managerial philosophy. That team football is first and
foremost a collective endeavour with success best achieved through that end.
All other things like individual genius come second! Take a look at how it panned
out. Some of the great individual stars of the tournament made little
difference to their national team’s progress through the competition. Star
players like Messi and Ronaldo, Rodriguez, Robben and Van Persie shone brightly
but only too briefly in individual games before being man-marked and all but
snuffed out. It was collective team performance on the other hand that made its
mark with those of Costa Rica, Chile, Columbia and Algeria standing out. Teams
built around star players on the other hand failed dismally when they failed to
perform or were injured. The most glaring example in the whole tournament in
this respect was Brazil!
The German approach was the complete
opposite. They played as a team, many of their players shining as individual
stars, so when one of their best players, Sami Khedira, was ruled out of the
final only moments before it began it made little difference. Their performance
rested on their ability as a team, not on one or two gifted players as with
Brazil and Argentina.
Having said this what then was the
managerial philosophy of Roy Hodgson who had a much shorter time to build up a
team. Two years indeed wasn’t that much but it was something! So what did
Roy Hodgson do with the players he’d chosen? Well there was the problem! In two
years of supposed selecting and planning he switched his national team players
around with such remarkable regularity that it left most observers bewildered
let alone players. It was a kind of in-out, in-out and shake-it-all-about
approach to team building with no single squad of eleven ever getting much of a
chance to play together. Astonishingly, even up to the time of the pre World
Cup ‘friendlies’ against Ecuador and Honduras, no team appeared to be finalized
with everything kind of being kept secret!
No single team finalized, let alone players
having worked together for hundreds of hours, their individual personalities,
skills and abilities forged into a unity. No collective purpose and enterprise
worked out. No mutual understanding between players. No plan for each
individual game. Was it any wonder then that each player seemed to lack any
imagination in knowing what to do with the ball, and in the absence of any
concerted plan kept on passing the ball back only too often from up front all
the way back to the goalkeeper! This back passing was a key feature of
England’s play. They just didn’t know what to do with the ball. Their players
just kept walking it around as though in a daze. All of it explained by their lack
of playing practice together. Its result, a shabby, totally unimaginative and
shameful series of performances entirely the fault of a hapless, sterile
management philosophy.
Let’s take a much deeper look while we’re
here. Since Germany became a nation at the beginning of the 1870’s they’ve had
an extensive experience of dominant one man rule. Bismarck first followed by
Kaiser Willy who dragged them into the First World War followed by the
greatest, most murderous dictator of all. Three brutal national leaders, a war
against France in 1870 followed by Two World Wars in rapid succession. Result
of all this splendid one man leadership effort, hundreds of millions dead and
Germany reduced to ashes. From 1945 onwards, German society became an
altogether more collective creation, especially in its social and economic
organisation. No more single individual top down approach anymore.
Economically, an entirely more collective attitude to industrial organisation
and cooperation between workers and management. A steady build up and creation
of a highly prosperous economy based on stability and the harmonizing of
industrial relations. Much of it best summed up by the notion of a collective
team approach.
For eighty years the German experience was
brutal and it was only at the end of that time that they learned. By way of
contrast the British experience has been so very different, but whenever its
people chose leaders who came close to being dictators the result was similarly
bad i.e. Margaret Thatcher, who at the end was clearly losing her marbles.
There was endless chaos, endless conflict, endless social division and
disharmony. All notion of community and community spirit, of a collective
effort, of a harmonious society, gave way to a notion of individualism, of
personalization and privatization which she encouraged. In Britain we actually
stood on the brink of becoming a police state with social conflict only too
often prompted by top down heavy handed political and managerial attitudes.
A top down heavy handed approach to society
and its problems came to characterize the Thatcher era. It was in its way
almost an extension of feudal mannerisms and attitudes. With the rapid
replacement of industrial occupations and employment by those of finance and
commerce the new values of a selfish individualism quickly replaced those of
communality, of people selflessly helping each other and the broader spirit of
social harmony and cooperation. It was out of such a time that the Premier
League of English football was born. One that came to be dominated by
individualists, star performers of the game often from overseas, which at the
same time witnessed the evolution of football from what was once essentially a
sport into a commercial endeavour dominated by a transfer fee system which
brought huge financial rewards to clubs and individual players.
English football today is very different to
what it had once been in the 1960’s and 70’s. In this context it should be
remembered that it was in 1966 that England won the World Football Cup. It was
a very different time of English football, English footballers and English
footballing management skills. The England World Cup winning team was built by
its manager Alf Ramsay, himself a long time professional, over a period of many
years. It’s players had been trained to play together as a team and it was a
team philosophy more than any other that prevailed in its creation. One that
was very much part of English football for many years previously. Football as a
sport. As a club game. Its First Division down teams gaining their support and
finance from an audience that was solidly industrial working class. The spirit
of English club game football dominated Ramsay’s creation of England’s winning
World Cup team of 1966. In tournaments since then, England performances, often
overseen by foreign management, have drifted into steady decline culminating in
the fiasco of 2014 under a desperately rushed managerial compromise.
English football management philosophy
today, particularly those operating in the Premier League where so much is dominated by financial
consideration and the use of overseas players, is imbued more with a consideration
of individual performance than with the collective performance of the team.
Stardom and transfer fees dominate what is now essentially a business. The
patience and skill necessary for creating a national squad is something almost
lost to the English game. That’s why there’s a problem.
That’s why those managing English football right
at the top need to start thinking all over again. Do you actually care about
the millions of people who support the English national game, or do you only
care about money?
I suggest that you give some of your time
to thinking why so many national teams that participated in the 2014 World Cup
who built their hopes around one or two individual star players bit the dust
and why others who seemed to come out of nowhere and play in a collective team
spirit became the real stars of this year’s celebration of football.
Football should be a game. A game about people. Not
about money.
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