A year ago, there was a lot of excitement. Youth football was to be reformed. At first, not everyone was happy with the measures. That has now changed.
According to DFB youth director Hannes Wolf, the approval of the initially criticized reform in football training is “tremendous.” There was a gap in knowledge and certain topics were not explained sufficiently, which is why the criticism arose. Borussia Dortmund’s managing director Hans-Joachim Watzke and Austria’s German national coach Ralf Rangnick had also “understood it long ago,” Wolf assured “Sportbuzzer” in an interview.
Comparison with spectacular 3×3 basketball at the Olympics
“Anyone who looks at the developments can only come to the conclusion that for six-year-olds, three-on-three on several courts is better than nine-on-nine,” stressed Wolf. The best example of this is 3×3 basketball: the German women won Olympic gold in this spectacular and fast-paced discipline. It represents the training philosophy in Germany: one goal, with rotating attack rights and a shot clock.
Essentially, the German Football Association’s youth reform envisages that smaller teams in certain age groups will play on smaller fields. “There was also discussion about no longer playing for goals. Soon we will be playing without a ball,” Watzke said. “I think that is fundamentally the wrong approach.”
Wolf countered this criticism: “This is how top athletes are developed, with small game formats. Their individual class develops over the course of their entire lives. We have left too much to chance.” In addition, too few U21 players are used in professional leagues. According to Wolf, people have lost sight of what is important.
What the English and French should say
In the past, you didn’t spend forever thinking about your opponent, “but filled your week with making your own team better. That has changed in the last ten or twelve years.”
Wolf’s goal: “We want to go from being a scouting country to being a developing country and reverse the trend so that the English and the French will say at some point: It’s amazing how many good young players the Germans have, they’re doing a lot of things right.”
Source: Stern
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