Dhe corona pandemic has mixed up a lot, changed perspectives and perspectives. Even in sports. For example, the appointment calendar has been rearranged. Competitions were canceled, relocated or compressed in so-called bubbles. And so international football will experience two European championships this summer.
One ended on Sunday with the triumphant victory of the German U21 national team. The other one starts on Friday. Unlike usual – the best youth teams on the continent usually play their tournament twelve months after the seniors – the public receives a direct comparison.
With the third title in the association’s history, the DFB youngsters provided the A-team with a template, motivation and inspiration that were hardly thought possible. Late on Sunday evening in Ljubljana he produced pictures and sentences that reminded every footballer what is possible. And what is necessary for it.
The team wins. The German U21 around Bielefeld’s Amos Pieper won the European Championship for the third time
What: AP
Admittedly, a comparison of the two German selections would be dubious and unjust. But like the national coach Joachim Löw’s team, which had been stumbling for years, the U21s had also traveled to their finals as outsiders. In this respect, the 1-0 final victory over Portugal does not mean that a double European Championship triumph can be derived directly. But the senior team can also learn something from this. For your tournament starting on Friday and the future of (German) football in general.
Annoyed by the market value comparison
When U21 left winger David Raum gave a short TV interview after the trophy was handed over, he sounded very much like Löw when he announced his EM squad almost three weeks ago. “We have to give the people of the country the image at the European Championships that there is a team on the field,” the national coach demanded before his last tournament. “We wanted to show everyone that it is important to exist as a unit,” said the 23-year-old Raum.
In contrast to the golden generation with the later world champions around Manuel Neuer in 2009 and their successors around Serge Gnabry eight years later, the 2021 selection was not among the title candidates. The alleged penalty of having the worse individual players compared to nations like the Netherlands, France or Portugal has become drive and motivation. The players were tired of having million differences calculated in the market value comparison. It simply annoyed them, explained Raum.
That’s exactly how they played. Until the end, when Stefan Kuntz with tears of joy in his eyes and his European champions danced on the lawn and the coach bowed to winning goal scorer Lukas Nmecha. The German calculation was simple, and it worked: team unity should increase one’s own performance and thus be greater than the sum of the individual class in the ranks of the opponents.
Kuntz as Sales Manager
Kuntz himself had opened it. Fittingly, a man who was latently underestimated during his active days. As an attacker, he was twice Bundesliga top scorer, celebrated the German championship with Kaiserslautern in 1991 and, as a top performer in an outsider group, the European Championship title two years earlier.
Stefan Kuntz, coach of the German U21s, presents the EM trophy after the team’s arrival at Frankfurt Airport
Source: dpa / Arne Dedert
When the expert René Adler brought the reasons for the success closer to the 9.3 million TV viewers at ProSieben and repeatedly chose words like “solidarity”, “passion” and “character”, commentator Uwe Morawe interrupted him without further ado and added that he all of which reminded me of 1954: the miracle of Bern.
Maybe a little too much pathos, but Adler and Morawe could not be refuted in the matter. In any case, Kuntz elevated the supposed anachronism to an effective stylistic device. He promised his outsiders before the tournament that he would be their best sales manager. “And before the semi-final against the Netherlands, I said to them: ‘We need a lion heart, but we also need eagle eyes so that we can see everything that has to do with the match plan. And: You must be a gang of hyenas. Nobody likes them, but in the end they always get what they want. ‘”
U21 provides a template for the Löw team
It was a speech that got by without the vocabulary that has become commonplace in modern football. Kuntz did not talk about spaces that were far from the pass or about sixes that were tipping over. And for everyone who might turn up their noses in the face of the shirt-sleeved rhetoric, he had one more question ready: “What is talent really now? Is that what you win in the end? Or is it just sprint times or something? ”Perhaps there was defiance in the words. The disappointment that despite having reached three European Championship finals in a row (2017, 2019, 2021), of which he also won two, he apparently was not a serious contender to succeed Löw. The DFB decided on Hansi Flick.
But his fundamental question should also concern the association, especially with a view to the senior national team. How should training take place in Germany in the future? Where are the priorities set? With their appearance at the first of the two European championships of the summer, the U21 reminded of what is still important in football despite all the importance of sprint strength, shot hardness, pass rates, tactical and technical finesse: character and team spirit.
Lukas Nmecha shot the German U21s, whom many had seen as outsiders, to the European Championship title
Source: dpa / Darko Bandic
The message has already arrived at the DFB, as Meikel Schönweitz suggests. At the tournament in Hungary and Slovenia, the head coach of the youth teams recognized “a young team that has and embodies everything that everyone longs for. Hard work, passion, pride in representing your own country, football solutions, humility, team spirit, tactical discipline, defensive spirit and simply success, “he said to the” kicker “:” The guys understand what it’s all about and have a spirit who carried them through this tournament, who released their strength. ”And thus provided the starting point for the big European championships.
New perspectives, new approaches, new values? From Friday, the public can take a closer look to see whether the A-Team stands up to the direct comparison.
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