German win validates billion dollar investment

Germany secured their fourth World Cup earlier this month, capping off a fine summer and cementing their place as one world football’s historic powerhouses.

They have a proud footballing history and added to that history when they became the first European team ever to win a World Cup on South American soil.

They were among the favourites to win the cup before the tournament started and lived up to that tag from their very first game, a 4-0 trouncing of Portugal.

In true German fashion they were clinical, disciplined, measured and ruthless and while many of the top nations at the World Cup relied on their stars to step up and take their team further than it probably deserved, the Germans typified team football.

They were coachable, executed game plans and every player knew their role and remained disciplined enough to not try and do too much. In all honesty the World Cup final could have gone either way as both teams had their respective chances, fortunately for the Germans Mario Goetze stepped up when they needed him most.

It was in the semi-final however, where Germany’s true class showed. As the BBC’s South American football correspondent Tim Vickery put it, “Germany played to the team, Brazil played to the gallery”.

Germany knew the style of football they wanted to play and Brazil very much let them play it. While many teams looked to certain players to base their attack around, Germany had an abundance of players they could look to. They never relied on one player to get them over the edge the way Neymar, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Arjen Robben were looked at to do.

That’s not to say there were no German stars. Philipp Lahm, Sami Khedira, Miroslav Klose, Thomas Mueller, Manuel Neuer and Toni Kroos were among the very best in Brazil, but none of them were relied on as the sole torch bearer. They all knew their roles and played team football to its finest, en-route to a historic fourth World Cup.

When they beat Argentina and lifted the cup it was a win for the players, the coaching staff, the German Football Association, the nation of Germany and even the German government. They’re a proud nation with proud people, so when they lifted the cup it was the first time they had done so as a unified nation.

Germany used to be divided under East and West, and when the Berlin Wall was finally knocked down and the country was unified, legendary German centre back Franz Beckenbauer claimed that we would all witness a new age of German dominance. Since that period they have won one major championship in the form of Euro 1996 and have made the semi-finals in the last four World Cups.

When they lost the World Cup final in 2002 to one of the greatest Brazilian teams of all time, the country was in mourning and bitterly disappointed. It was the end of a generation that featured the likes of Oliver Kahn, Oliver Bierhoff and Christian Ziege, who bowed out just short of the greatest prize in football.

Current coach and former player Joachim Loew said the country realised a decade ago that it could not rely on its traditional values and expect international success.

So the Germans proceeded to spend over $1 billion on their youth system over the course of the next year to give the next generation a solid platform for success. The country received an overhaul, with the goal being to retain the best talent, teach them new skills and provide them state-of-the-art facilities.

It became mandatory for Bundesliga clubs to invest in youth training centres and academies of which are inspected and rated annually. Six players who featured in the World Cup winning team featured in winning youth sides which won European championships. They invested locally and domestically across amateur and professional levels to produce the talent of tomorrow and the stars of today, and those stars shone no brighter than they did in the final.

Instead of spending millions in bringing in overseas talent they were committed to investing in their own and the investment has paid off. The US has recently decided to implement the same strategy in a hope that they are able to reproduce the German’s success on their own soil.

It’s a lot of money to invest in the hope that you will be repaid in the form of championships and international success, but in this particular instance it was worth its price in gold.