Michael Hofmann still lives football as he did during his professional career. The 50-year-old often posts memories of his time as a goalkeeper at TSV 1860 Munich or shows photos in his profile with the Lions of the 1990s and 2000s, who were successful in the Bundesliga. After retiring from the sport in 2017, he remained loyal to the sport and was a member of the coaching staff at Türkgücü Munich for five years. Hofmann has been sporting director of the Bavarian Football Academy (BFA) for two months now. That sounds like a civil servant job in a state institution, but in reality it is a private school for particularly ambitious athletes.
The BFA is – like the football talents (FT) Freiham – one of those training centers that has recently been subjected to harsh criticism from the mass sports clubs: Here, dreams of children and their families from professional football are played with, false promises are made that providers had to pay dearly. Incidentally, the amateur clubs, which fulfill an important social task by giving children something to do in their free time, would be undermined. Another annoyance for critics of the BFA and similar commercial offers, especially in the greater Munich area, is that it is often not the young players themselves whose ambitions go beyond the norm, but their parents.
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The former Löwen goalkeeper Michael Hofmann is the new sporting director of the Bavarian Football Academy (BFA).
(Foto: Goldberg/Beautiful Sports/Imago)
Hofmann knows these reservations and makes it clear which priorities he wants to set himself: “The decisive factor is the development of the children, and not the daydreams and stories of some coaches and parents.” He stands “for values, not for castles in the air”. The same applies to his former teammate at TSV 1860, Horst Heldt, who bought the academy with his wife Bettina in spring 2022. The Heldts’ son was playing for one of the BFA youth teams at the time. “Horst is fully behind our work, he also wants us to develop the children with good coaches,” says Hofmann.
Heldt prefers to stay in the background. You can see him from time to time at youth games on the soccer field, but he leaves the talking to his sports director. Heldt is currently under discussion as sports director at the third division club TSV 1860 Munich. If he gets the post, cooperation with the BFA is conceivable. He lets it be known that his BFA commitment is by no means about earning money, rather it has to be paid for.
A thesis that David Schneider supports. The 34-year-old is sporting director at FT Freiham. While the BFA cooperates with the popular sports club SV Waldperlach in the south-east of Munich, the FT itself is an association. “For us, it’s not about commercial ulterior motives,” says Schneider. “We currently have an annual coverage gap of around 100,000 euros.” This is also related to the fact that the infrastructure is still being worked on and the coaches are being paid good money. “None of them can buy a golden Rolls Royce with our fees, but working with the talent should be worth it.”
Even when the construction work has been completed, there will probably still be a shortfall, but this can be reduced by sponsors and additional income from training camps. “If we were looking for profits, we would look for a partner club and work exclusively with them. But then the door to the other clubs would be closed,” says Schneider. However, the concept provides that the best kickers should be helped in their search for a place in a youth training center and that good contact be maintained with several professional clubs. The current rate shows that this is working: According to Schneider, FT Freiham was able to place eight players this summer, one each for FC Bayern, TSV 1860 and FC Augsburg, two for SpVgg Unterhaching and four for FC Ingolstadt .
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David Schneider, sporting director of the football talents Freiham.
(Photo: Bruno Haelke / privat)
Of course, one would like to bring a footballer into the professional field, but that cannot be planned: “I will never hear such promises.” Schneider refers to his own experiences as a trainer: He worked as a youth coach for four years each at 1. FC Nürnberg and SpVgg Unterhaching before he met the founder of FT Freiham, the online entrepreneur Robert Wuttke, in 2019. Both had similar ideas to fill the niche between youth academies and local amateur sport. Four years later, over 100 children are training with the soccer talents, and seven teams are playing.
The FT have made it a principle that only young kickers are accepted whose journey is not too far. “It makes no sense to take kids from Gersthofen or Landsberg with us, even if there are such requests,” says Schneider. In order to be able to cover the east of Munich, the first branch, the soccer talents Munich, is being founded in Riem. In autumn, the branch starts playing with three teams.
Both the BFA and FT Freiham strive for a good reputation. The mass sports clubs are still annoyed. Half of the youth teams were “hijacked in a surprise attack,” emphasizes Michael Franke. He is chairman of FT Gern, the home club of world champion Philipp Lahm. Last winter he founded the action alliance “Fair Youth Football Munich” with seven other clubs and explicitly qualified the BFA and FT Freiham as “pseudo clubs” in an SZ interview at the time.
At the moment, however, the alliance is “a difficult issue,” says Franke. This is because his club has entered into a partnership with the FC Bayern campus.
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Michael Franke, chairman of FT Gern and founder of the action alliance “Fair Youth Football Munich”.
(Photo: privat/oh)
This, in turn, was not well received by some clubs, such as SV Waldperlach, the cooperation partner of the BFA. Its youth leader Sebastian Feder complains of a “double standard” in Gern’s approach, after all, his club is constantly criticized from the ranks of the action alliance for working with a commercial school. “They preach water and drink wine, I could go through the roof there.”
Franke justifies himself: “The main thing is to send our coaches to visit Bayern and to enable our kids to train regularly for development teams.” In addition, FCB no longer has any youth teams below the U11 level, which means that changes at an early age are ruled out. He sticks to his criticism and emphasizes that the “academies” would tear too many players out of their home clubs too early – with no prospect of a real competitive career. And that the mass sports clubs keep losing their painstakingly trained coaches.
Niko Ludwig, youth director at FC Teutonia Munich, is also concerned about this: “I’ve already had to hand four youth coaches over to Freiham. Of course they think it’s great: they were volunteers with us, they earn real money there.” We are talking about up to 400 euros that a coach receives monthly.
So far, Ludwig has also been anything but happy with the recruitment of players by commercial football schools: “They then came to youth tournaments with six or seven scouts, it was a real meat inspection.” It is the task of a club to pick up young people from the area. “But if you watch training in Freiham, for example, there isn’t a single bike there. You just see a lot of cars with their parents waiting in the parking lot.”
“I was shocked at times by the way parents attacked the referee and opposing players,” says Michael Hofmann
The BFA has not had a good reputation in the past for a number of reasons. This was also due to the public appearance of parents and players. “I was partly shocked how parents attacked the referee and opposing players,” says the new sports director Hofmann. He will no longer tolerate such behavior in the future. Sebastian Feder, the youth leader of the Waldperlach cooperation association, puts it into perspective: Complaints landed on his desk, but it wasn’t just BFA parents who misbehaved, but also “some of our Waldperlachers”.
In addition, according to the volunteers in the mass sports clubs, the former BFA sports director had acted quite aggressively in his poaching attempts. His successor Hofmann relies on dialogue: “I’ve already spoken to a few clubs. It’s important to me that we don’t work against each other when it comes to promoting young talent, but rather together.”
At FT Freiham they have also learned from previous confrontations. In the meantime, they take on “a maximum of two players from one year of a club,” says sports director Schneider. “Of course it’s always stupid when a club loses players, but it’s also part of football and it’s normal if you treat each other with style and respect.”
The association admits that there is a need to catch up when it comes to well-trained youth coaches
“Of course we like to hear that,” says Teutonia official Ludwig. “But they really have to do something for their image.” And Gern-Boss Franke says: “We won’t turn back the wheel anymore, but I would be happy if a different approach prevailed at the football schools.”
The question remains as to how the Bavarian Football Association (BFV) positions itself on this issue. “All parents see the new Thomas Müller in their son,” says BFV President Christoph Kern. Above all, the clubs in the metropolitan areas have “absolutely pent-up demand for well-trained coaches”. There weren’t enough volunteers, and if there were any, “they don’t have the time to train”.
Fabian Frühwirth, spokesman for the BFV, addresses another point: Many clubs charge very low membership fees, which are hardly sufficient to offer the children reasonable training conditions: A membership fee of around 35 euros a year is “a joke”. Teutonia youth leader Niko Ludwig picks up the thread: “In Freiham, the parents pay 180 euros a month for their children, with us it’s 168 euros – a year. It’s obvious that we can never do with this money what the others do .”
