Is Germany Heading for Humiliation at the Euros?

Last month, Toni Kroos posted a “short and painless” update to his Instagram feed, confirming that he had decided to heed the honey-soaked call of Julian Nagelsmann, Germany’s relatively new coach, and rescind his international retirement.

He would, he wrote, return to the national team — after three years away — and be available for selection for this summer’s European Championship. Given how torrid Germany’s preparations for the tournament have been, it was a welcome boost: The cavalry was arriving, albeit, this being Kroos, at a gentle, unruffled sort of pace.

There was something about the caption, though, that did not quite fill you with confidence. “Why?” Kroos asked, rhetorically, of his decision to return. “Because I was asked by the national coach, I’m up for it and I’m sure that a lot more is possible with the team at the European Championships than most people believe!”

It was not exactly a marketing slogan to stir the soul. As a representation of exactly where Germany is, three months out from a tournament it will host, though, it is hard to beat:

Germany 2024: It probably won’t be as bad as you think.

Julian Nagelsmann and his team will carry the hopes of the host nation into this summer’s Euros.Credit...Kirill Kudryavtsev/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The reasons for the angst are clear. When he was appointed last September, Nagelsmann became Germany’s third coach in three years. Joachim Löw, the man who had led the country to victory in the 2014 World Cup, had departed after Germany’s forlorn exit from the 2021 European Championship, his team falling to a limp defeat against England in the round of 16.

Löw was replaced by his former assistant, Hansi Flick, the warm, likable coach who had always had the ear of the players and — as is always the case in these situations — had been heralded as the true architect of the golden age. Flick had won a domestic and European treble at Bayern Munich. His appointment was, it seemed, a no-brainer.

That did not work either. At the World Cup in Qatar, Germany exited at the group stage, the victim of an admittedly unlikely set of results involving Japan’s beating Spain and the transit of Venus through Aquarius. It was the second World Cup in a row in which Germany had fallen at the first hurdle.

Flick struggled on for a few months, and then contrived to lose three games in a row. His last act was a 4-1 defeat in a friendly against Japan in September. A few hours later, he became the first man in almost a century to be fired as Germany coach. Nagelsmann, two years after succeeding Flick at Bayern Munich, now found himself doing the same for the national team.

In truth, the change has made little impact. Nagelsmann won his first game against the United States, a green shoot of hope amid all the despair. He drew with Mexico. And then he lost, in quick succession, to Turkey and to Austria.

Toni Kroos: back in black and white.Credit...Christopher Neundorf/EPA, via Shutterstock

His last two games before he names his squad for the finals are against France and the Netherlands, two of the favorites for this summer’s crown. Beyond restoring Kroos — a player Nagelsmann has described as the best in “bypassing the opposition” in Europe — it is not entirely clear how he intends to arrest the slide.

Kai Havertz played at left back in the fall. Nagelsmann has already decreed that will not be happening again. More than a dozen players who were involved against Austria and Turkey have been ignored this time around, among them the experienced Bayern midfielder Leon Goretzka.

In their place have come four players from Stuttgart, one of the Bundesliga’s in-form sides, who have one international appearance between them. These are not signs that suggest Germany has a settled vision. There is a reason people think this summer might, despite what Kroos says, go quite badly.

Even more mystifying, though, is quite how Germany slumped so far. This was, after all, the nation that only a decade ago seemed to have perfected youth development as an industrial process. Germany’s teams served as a smooth-running production line of talent. Borussia Dortmund even had an actual machine, the Footbonaut, for that purpose.

And it was also the country that was home to the ideology, the approach to the game, that would quickly become not just best practice but the default setting across much of Europe. Germany, through Ralf Rangnick and Jürgen Klopp and Thomas Tuchel, developed gegenpressing and the eight-second rule.

Germany was the future. Germany had solved the puzzle. Germany would no longer be susceptible to the same cycles of boom and bust, of coaching changes and individual scapegoats, as everyone else.

But while that is precisely where we are, how we got here is not clear. The most common explanation, of course, is that the fabled German reboot was an illusion, that the generation that won the 2014 World Cup was just a happy accident — either a confluence of complex and unrelated factors or a single bolt of lightning, neither of which can be controlled by humans. Germany, fooled by its success, grew complacent, only to discover that it did not have the answers after all.

Forward Deniz Undav is one of four Stuttgart players called up by Germany for the current international break.Credit...Kirill Kudryavtsev/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

There is a tendency, too, to wonder if the travails of Germany the team are somehow a manifestation of the country’s soccer culture as a whole: infighting among executives, a lack of innovation at clubs, a lack of direction and leadership and planning at pretty much every level.

Both theories have merit, and both have appeal: We like nice, rounded narratives. Neither quite explains the issue. Germany, after all, may not have as many good players as it did a decade ago, but it still has plenty. If a clear strategic vision at executive level was important for teams in international soccer, Italy would not have four World Cups.

Given the failure of successive Germany coaches — and dozens of players, some old, some young, some creative, some industrious — to get to the root of the problem, though, it seems increasingly clear that the problem is likely structural. It is worth considering if Germany’s system, so long its strength, is now its weakness.

The percussive, high-octane style first ushered into vogue by Rangnick, Klopp and the rest is now the default in the Bundesliga. It is how all of Germany’s players are raised. It is, though, complex: Each team will spend hundreds of hours fine-tuning its pressing strategies, adapting them to its needs and its resources.

The sort of time required to make it work, though, is not available in international soccer; it is why the international game tends to be less slick, less smooth and to appear, at times, less refined than its club counterpart. At the same time, asking players to change habits that have been inculcated in them since they were children for the sake of a few weeks every other summer is likely to end in failure.

And so Germany finds itself caught in a bind: an unbalanced but nonetheless gifted squad, unable to do what it knows but unable to do anything else, too, tasked with meeting the lofty expectations set by previous generations.

Löw and Flick could not pick their way through that conundrum. Nagelsmann has only three months to figure out a solution, and the early indications are not encouraging. Perhaps Kroos is right, and that is the best he can hope for: that whatever happens, it is not quite as bad as you think.

Brazil will play England and Spain during the international break.Credit...Jordan Pettitt/Press Association, via Associated Press

Roles, Reversed

It is a long time, if we are all being completely honest, since Brazil was last Brazil. The mere mention of the name, like the slightest glimpse of its canary yellow jersey, still carries with it a shiver of anticipation, an atavistic thrill. There is something hard-wired into anyone who saw the 1970 team, the 1982 team, the 1998 team, anyone who witnessed Ronaldo or Kaká or Sócrates or Jairzinho.

And yet it is hard to remember when the current incarnation of soccer’s most glamorous national team, its most potent brand, really warranted that reputation. It is not that Brazil has been poor since its last World Cup victory in 2002 — the teams it sent to the tournaments in 2006, 2014 and 2022 were all pretty good — but more that it has not been exceptional.

The Brazil embarking on a brief European tour this week is much the same. There is talent, of course, some of it proven and some of it not quite, but its resources are neither as deep nor as complete as either of its two hosts over the next week, England and Spain. Brazil’s vast well of raw material struggles to compete with the industrialized talent factories of Western Europe, let alone exceed it.

Indeed, it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that it is England, its opponent on Saturday, that currently has the greater star power, thanks in no small part to the global reach of the Premier League. And it is hard, given how much money and power resides in Europe, to see how that will change.

Time and Punishment

Just a quick note on the news that the dead hand of the Premier League’s independent panel has sanctioned a second team, this time Nottingham Forest, with a points deduction for breaching the league’s financial rules.

We can leave the whys and wherefores for another time, perhaps until after the appeal process is exhausted, either a matter of days or weeks after the season ends. (This is what we like about soccer, isn’t it? The courtroom drama?) Only then will we know who has actually been relegated.

But there is, I think, a growing issue with the way these stories are presented. It has become accepted fact, for example, that the cost-control rules are in place to protect the “cartel” of clubs at the summit of the Premier League, as if all of the other teams did not also actively agree to them when they were introduced.

Likewise, it has become rote to say that Everton and Nottingham Forest exceeded their limits only by a little; the former was, in fact, around $150 million away from the target, which is not to lose any money at all. It is by now also customary to suggest that, in the case of the latter, its only mistake was delaying the sale of a single player, rather than, perhaps, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on buying players in bulk.

But the biggest problem is that nobody ever puts out the other side. Leicester City now faces possible sanction, too, for breaches that took place before it was relegated from the Premier League last year. Leeds United finished 19th last season. The three sides immediately above it, it turns out, may not have been abiding by the rules. If the punishments had been issued in real time, Leeds would still be a Premier League club, and might be around $50 million better off. That does not scream fair.