The Bundesliga turns 60 – how football has changed

Felix Magath is certain that he could still do it today. He wouldn’t be a diametrically tipping six or a false nine, but at least he wouldn’t get run into the ground. The 70-year-old reports on the phone that his former team-mate Horst Hrubesch once told him that he had analyzed Hamburger SV’s old games.

“So players like Manfred Kaltz or I were already running more than 13 kilometers per game back then,” says Magath. “So the conditional abilities couldn’t have been that much worse in the past than they are today.” Technically, the players were even better 30 or 40 years ago because they had to play on worse pitches. So hasn’t everything gotten better, more intense, more exciting in the 60 years of the Bundesliga?

At least Magath sees it that way. He hasn’t experienced the league up close since it started in the summer of 1963, but the attacking player has been there since moving to HSV in 1976. For years he experienced the German elite class as a player, later he worked in it even longer as a coach. He doesn’t see that football has changed so much over the years.

Bundesliga has become more athletic over time

Like so many things in life, it’s a matter of perspective. Because of course the game has changed. However, since hardly any data was collected in the early years, it is difficult to compare statistics, at least. However, one can say that a lot has become more extreme, faster and more athletic without a lot of comparative data. In terms of speed alone.

The “kicker”, for example, has only had the speeds of the Bundesliga professionals since the 2013/2014 season. However, the 20 fastest players were all only measured from 2019. Borussia Dortmund’s Karim Adeyemi leads the rankings with a top speed of 36.65 km/h set last season.

“The intensity of the game has changed. The game has become extremely fast, for example through elements such as pressing and counter-pressing,” says Hannes Wolf, the new DFB director of youth, training and development in an interview with the German Press Agency. “These elements used to exist, but they’ve become more intense.”

In a way, Wolf is the opposite of Magath. He’s 28 years younger and doesn’t have a great playing career to look back on. Nevertheless, the former sports student made it to the top as a coach. He led VfB Stuttgart back to the top flight in 2017, after which he worked for HSV in the second division and for Bayer Leverkusen, among others. So Wolf also knows the Bundesliga, but he grew up in it differently than Magath.

The 42-year-old is used to working with a large coaching staff and all kinds of experts. On the other hand, when Magath returned to Hertha BSC in March 2022 after almost ten years away from the Bundesliga, he didn’t initially know what to do with all the employees.

Technical progress makes the biggest difference

“You put a lot more people in charge of dealing with a football team,” he says. “I think that you have taken the wrong path by believing that you are bringing in so-called specialists.” Wolf does not consider experts such as standard trainers to be absolutely necessary, but they could provide added value if used correctly.

You could talk to both of them for hours about their point of view – but what is the biggest change that has taken place in the Bundesliga in 60 years? Both think briefly when asked this question. And in the end, it’s surprising that they come up with the same thing, so to speak: It’s the technical possibilities that have changed working with football teams and thus also the game.

“One of the biggest differences between the past and today was certainly the video,” says Wolf. “That’s the biggest difference, that the tactical cameras can dissect any opponent.” In every Bundesliga stadium there are around 20 cameras that illuminate every corner of the field and can track every player and the ball. More than three million data points are collected in this way for each game.

Against this background, it is not surprising that the clubs have been expanding their analysis departments for years because experts are needed who can process this data. In quite a few clubs, mathematicians or statisticians are now working in the background to calculate things from countless data that can be useful for their own team or with a view to analyzing opponents.

Explanation for lack of German talents

In the professional field, Wolf thinks it makes sense because you have to “tease every percentage point out of it”. From his point of view, however, the fact that cameras are “even in every B and A youth place” has also brought about a negative development.

“A coach who used to know nothing about the opposition spent the week working on the details and improving his players,” he explains. Today, on the other hand, the focus is more on the next opponent. “In Germany we have to be careful that the focus is once again on developing our young players individually so that they can later play at the highest level.”

For similar reasons, Wolf and Magath do not consider it a coincidence that German football has recently produced very few top talents. “When I became youth coach at BVB in 2010, there was still no video analysis of the opponent. The 2014 world champions have also become so good without it having happened during their youth,” says Wolf. Magath doesn’t realize either that all the technology has “managed to improve the football and the players”.

And so in the end both seem to agree that in the 60 years of the Bundesliga, things will not always have to go forward, but sometimes also backwards. In this case it should be back to basics, as both agree. So back to the individual development of young players in particular. So that talents like Felix Magath can grow again in the league in the next 60 years.