The snapping of fingers with which Hannes Wolf accompanied one of his bold sentences was part of the message. Not that it would be possible to put German football on a different footing all of a sudden, no, not that. But that it is possible to take decisive action to get to a different point than now, that German football, which has recently been so depressing, has it in its own hands to ensure a better future, and not at some point, but in the foreseeable future – yes.
“We can change that today,” said Wolf, as an example of one of the undesirable developments he described on football fields in the country, namely that training is sometimes carried out in such a way that individual positions are almost “killed”, and snapped his fingers. And the former Bundesliga coach wanted this belief in the feasibility of change to be fully understood. Because even if he didn’t want to name a more concrete time horizon, he promised the football country the day when it rubs its eyes and exclaims: “Whoa, where do all the good players come from!”
Wolf was presented to the German Football Association (DFB) on Monday as the new director for youth, training and development, “an important building block in the new structure that we will give ourselves,” as DFB President Bernd Neuendorf said to his right on the Podium in Frankfurt meant a “stroke of luck”, as Rudi Völler added on the left. The way the 42-year-old wolf presented himself, he wants to be one thing above all: the do-gooder in German football at a crucial point.
Too much training time wasted
He wanted to “make the subject of training big,” he said. With the aim of creating more “width at the top” again in the long term. Because it is one of the not entirely new but unpleasant empirical findings that nations like England or France had three to four times as many players in the U-21 area who are used in the professional leagues, at the most recent U-21 EM, according to Wolf, Germany was among the top nations with the “fewest minutes of action”.
The fact that he does not act as a soloist to reduce this structural deficit, but as a team player and networker, should be illustrated by the quintet present from his ten-strong team of experts, including former Bundesliga professionals Sandro Wagner, Hanno Balitsch and Lars Bender or the former national player in Frankfurt on Monday Lena Lotzen confidants who docked with him in the course of his work at the DFB, where he has been working since 2020 and is currently also responsible for the U-20 national team. Wagner and Balitsch immediately supported Wolf’s view that in the recent past too much training time was wasted and too little work was done on the basics, “raw football”, as Wagner put it.
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From his previous work, he could “say very specifically what constitutes good training,” emphasized Wolf, and in this context showed himself, among other things, to be a fan of the new forms of play in children’s soccer, which German soccer had fought hard to achieve. Even with this bottom-up approach, however, it remains to be seen what ultimately matters at the top – and when. It will also depend on circumstances that Wolf and his team don’t have direct access to.
Only one of three vacancies filled
Wolf had previously earned a good reputation as a youth coach at Borussia Dortmund, he knows professional football from his positions in Stuttgart, Hamburg, Genk and Leverkusen, where he helped out from the DFB activity in 2021 and Völler with a view of the bigger picture ” impressed,” as he said. In any case, Wolf is not lacking in zest for action and a love of detail; it was also a pound in the selection process, as President Neuendorf indicated. The issue of money, however, was not mentioned at all on Monday – and thus also not the question of how that other structural deficit that plagues the DFB on the way to the future affects the possibilities of personnel selection.
With Wolf as the new director, the first of a total of three vacancies in the structure into which the association has divided Oliver Bierhoff’s former empire has now been filled. In addition to Wolf and Völler, who is responsible for the senior national team and the U21s, there should also be someone for the women at director level, and the position of managing director for the administrative management of the entire area must also be filled. Names that are circulating, such as Joti Chatzialexiou, currently sporting director of national teams at the DFB, for the former and Nadine Kessler, currently head of the women’s football department at the European association UEFA, for the latter (and who has already been contacted by the DFB in this regard) were not commented on. However, President Neuendorf expressed the hope that the decisions would be made “quickly”.
