These days, the city of Cologne is moving purposefully towards the emotional exceptional situation known as carnival. Those in disguise have long been populating the streets, halls and bars, belting out songs that have become catchy tunes. Before things really get started next week, the city of Cologne has another event coming up this Wednesday (6 p.m. on DAZN), the scope of which football coach Stefan Ruthenbeck finds “completely insane”.
Ruthenbeck coaches the U-19 team of 1. FC Köln, which took the risk of moving from the small Franz Kremer Stadium in Geißbockheim to the large arena in Müngersdorf for a game. After three days, all 50,000 tickets for the duel against Inter Milan were sold out, which is now also being admired in Munich, Dortmund and Stuttgart. He has to be careful “that the boys aren’t too euphoric,” says Ruthenbeck, which is understandable given the hype in the city.
“Part of the problem lies in our league system”
Other German clubs are also in the round of 16 of the Youth League, Bayer Leverkusen is playing at FC Villarreal, Borussia Dortmund is playing in Alkmaar, Frankfurt is playing at Atlético Madrid, only Bayern Munich has already been eliminated. But Cologne plays a special role.
In contrast to the established European Cup teams, who acquired their right to participate based on the Champions League qualification of the professional teams, the Cologne team reached the prestigious competition as German U-19 champions via the so-called championship round. They represent a club for whom a visit from Milan to a competitive game arouses great emotions, and are now setting a record attendance in a competition in which German teams have been surprisingly unsuccessful.
No German club has ever reached the semi-finals since the Youth League was introduced in 2013. The all-time table is led by Real Madrid, FC Barcelona and Benfica Lisbon. Bayern Munich and BVB are in eleventh and twelfth place. But why is that? The German youth national teams are ultimately quite successful. “Part of the problem lies in our league system,” says Jochen Sauer, director of youth development at Bayern Munich.
The U-19 players operate in a complex competitive environment in which it is not easy to develop good orientation. They have the chance to establish themselves in the professional teams in the Bundesliga, where they are often only supplementary players. They can be loaned out or play in the second teams of clubs, which usually belong to one of the five regional leagues.
German imbalances in the transition area
You can play in a U19 in the former U19 Bundesliga, which has been called the DFB youth leagues for a year and a half. Dortmund, Mönchengladbach and Leipzig are taking part in the so-called Premier League International Cup U21 with teams specially constructed from U-19 talents and young regional league players, where 16 Premier League clubs compete in groups of eight with 16 clubs from other nations. And Germany will soon have its own U-21 league.
It is quite challenging to find the best place for German talent to develop well in this system, and the best theoretically available players almost never actually compete in the Youth League.
Their peers in Spain, Austria or Portugal, on the other hand, can often gain experience in the second teams of clubs in the respective second leagues and can be transferred to the U19s for the really big games. However, the imbalances in the transition from youth to adult football are only one reason for the modest success of German clubs in U-19 football.
For example, Jefta Bresser, the head of the NLZ at Bayer Leverkusen, says that the best Leverkusen players who are eligible to play in the Youth League are not there at all. Francis Onyeka was loaned to Bochum and Artem Stepanov to FC Utrecht because there is no U21 at Bayer 04 and therefore no suitable team for such people.
“Leave your heart on the pitch, have a lot of passion”
In addition, the aftereffects of an old mistake are still visible, says Paul Schaffran, the head of Borussia Dortmund’s youth performance center (NLZ) in a club podcast: “We didn’t focus enough on individual development, but rather on team success.”
Youth football experts in other nations are much better at not only seeing a player’s current strength, but also future developments, says Jefta Bresser: “At the end of training, where the physical differences are no longer so great, the players from countries are stronger where, between the ages of ten and 16, more attention was paid to development and less to results.”
Now, in the knockout phase of the Youth League, the results are important for everyone involved, even if Cologne coach Ruthenbeck says he knows what is expected: “Leave your heart on the pitch, have a lot of passion, nobody needs to be afraid.”
In any case, the people of Cologne will gain valuable experience because such a big game does something for the boys, believes Jochen Sauer, Munich’s director of youth development. “If you can play football there as a U-19 team in front of 50,000 people, that is of course sensational.” Some players will “get a push, but others may have to be helped to get back into everyday life in the youth leagues”. Carnival is coming up, the time when you can sometimes lose your grip on the ground.
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