Football Hans Joachim Watzke
“Soon we’ll make the ball square” – DFB Vice blasphemes about reforms in youth football
Status: 07.09.2023 | Reading time: 3 minutes
Will they soon have to motivate themselves for festivals and game afternoons or for games with a winner and a loser?
Source: picture alliance/Pressebildagentur ULMER/ulmer
No winner, no table, but game afternoons and festivals – DFB Vice Hans-Joachim Watzke thinks the changes in youth football are wrong and announces a reform of the reform. In justifying this, he draws parallels with society as a whole.
The German Football Association (DFB) has been working on a new concept for youth football for several years. The result has been the subject of fierce criticism for months. From 2024, according to the actual plan of the DFB, new forms of play are to be implemented nationwide in the youth field in order to minimize the pressure to perform and to focus more on the sporting development of children. The most important goal of the reform in the U6 to U11 age groups is “to promote long-term fun in the game with a child-friendly type of football,” according to the DFB.
In plain language this means: instead of championship rounds with tables, games with victory and defeat, afternoon games and festivals with several teams and playing fields are planned for girls and boys up to eleven years of age. The abolition of the performance principle causes a lot of incomprehension in these age groups, even with the first vice president of the DFB Hans-Joachim Watzke.
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“These plans are unbelievable and I don’t understand them,” said Watzke. The managing director of BVB announced changes. When asked whether a reform of the reform was needed, Watzke said at the “DUP Entrepreneur Day”: “Yes. And we just decided that. The new DFB sports director Hannes Wolf should try to show us alternative courses of action over the next year or two.”
“Fear that losing an 8-year-old will throw him off balance”
Watzke strongly criticized this philosophy. “If when you’re six, eight or nine you never feel what it’s like to lose, then you’ll never find the great strength to win. If we are afraid that an eight-year-old will be completely thrown off balance because he loses 5-0 with his team, then that says a lot about German society,” said Watzke.
Watzke is DFB vice and BVB managing director – his word carries weight in German football
Source: dpa/David Indian song
He is not alone in football with this opinion. Most recently, European champion Thomas Helmer and Cologne’s coach Steffen Baumgart found clear words on the abolition of the performance principle. “We are a generation that only goes the soft and shallow path,” said Baumgart in the “WDR”. It’s not bad if a child loses: “It has to learn to deal with defeats. I have to learn to enjoy the sport, not just when I score ten goals.”
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If the children still have goals at all. “There was also a discussion about not playing for goals anymore. Soon we’ll be playing without the ball. Or we’ll square it so that it doesn’t run away from the somewhat slower youngsters. I think that’s fundamentally the wrong approach,” said Watzke.
“The pain of defeat gives you the strength to win again”
According to Watzke, there are many people in the DFB and in society as a whole who say: “We need less pressure to perform and stress at work and prefer to have a little more home office. We all have to be happy and peaceful and all get along well and in the end make sure that we find someone who pays for the whole thing. And that has already made its way into youth football, you shouldn’t underestimate that. And I think it’s completely wrong.”
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According to Watzke, the successful coach Ottmar Hitzfeld said to him “a sentence a long time ago that I will never forget: ‘The pain of defeat gives you strength for the next victory.'”
