Football Germany has an important task for the summer of 2024: a new summer fairy tale is to be created. The problem: Euphoria requires a strong national team. That doesn’t currently exist. Now a new documentary is being released that is not very flattering.
Oh Germany, you and your gray geese…, sorry, you and your footballers! The national team players at the World Cup in Qatar were supposed to orientate themselves on the rather colorless representative of the duck family. The team should have moved through the desert with powerful wing beats (how this should have been implemented on the pitch is currently unclear). After two bitterly disappointing major tournaments, the bird should fly again at the controversial event on the Persian Gulf. Football should be successful, the country should be swept along like a flock of greylag geese on the way to their winter quarters. The end is known: the DFB team was eliminated from the preliminary group with Japan, Spain and Costa Rica. It was the next stage in a nosedive that has been unstoppable since the 2018 World Cup debacle. After all, it was winter and it stayed in German football over the summer, which is slowly going away.
Now the gray geese… sorry, the footballers have landed on the Mittelland Canal. But they want to recharge their batteries for the trip to the home European Championship next summer. The order has already been placed for them. A new summer fairy tale is here. The problem: Euphoria requires a strong national team. But it is still as weak as the traffic light coalition’s poll numbers. And the belief that now against Japan in Wolfsburg (8.45 p.m. on RTL and in the ntv.de live ticker) and on Tuesday against France in Dortmund (8.45 p.m., ARD and in the ntv.de live ticker) EVERYTHING turns out for the better is carefully worded, not particularly big. At least not in the surrounding area.
Embarrassment instead of momentum against Japan
National coach Hansi Flick may see it differently. He emphasizes this at every opportunity. He believes in his path, but from Friday it will be accompanied by a documentary that doesn’t particularly flatter him. The four-part series “All or Nothing” is published on Amazon and traces the bitter failure in Qatar. It is, as speaker Bela Rethy says, “the story of a tragedy.” In the middle of the deep DFB crisis, this comes at an inopportune time. So why now? Good question. Part of the answer: The association had no right to veto either the filming or the choice of release date. Gone stupid. Presumably everything was originally thought of completely differently, a hero’s story should be written, and not a “tragedy” on all levels, sporting, political and social.
Because the audience knows the end of this debacle, the stages shown are sometimes difficult to bear and at certain moments one gets feelings of embarrassment. The “Flight of the Greylag Geese” has become the epitome of this. A short motivational film that was intended to give the team a boost before the first game against the Japanese. The result is known. In a strange way, Germany gave up a lead against the East Asians and was embarrassed by the rather average Bundesliga professionals Ritsu Doan and Takuma Asano.
People are turning away from the DFB team
The image of a relaxed Hansi Flick has been difficult to maintain for a long time. While in the summer of 2021 Germany was still in love with the new national coach, who was supposed to free the national team from the heavy burden of the late Joachim Löw years, the 56-year-old has now lost a large part of the support. Because in his increasingly desperate search for success, he is taking a path that no longer engages the team’s fans, because he gives out things in interviews, hardly seems receptive to criticism, and sometimes appears stubborn. What’s particularly bad is that people are more likely to turn away from the DFB team than to call for the national coach’s resignation in great anger.
The credit has been used up. Flick and the team, which has no longer been called “The Team” since Oliver Bierhoff left for Qatar, are responsible. This makes the date for the publication of the documentary all the more unfavorable. The four-part series conveys one thing above all: the impression that Flick did not reach the players, that he did not succeed in arousing the players’ emotions. Quite significant: When survival in the tournament was at stake in the second group game, DFB newcomer and joker Niclas Füllkrug took hold and gave his team a goosebumps (sorry!) speech. It is the moment of great emotion, one of the few. That’s how it works.
Otherwise: an eternally relaxed Thomas Müller, tense DFB officials who always despair over the issue of “One Love” armbands, and a Joshua Kimmich who clashes with the defensive giants Antonio Rüdiger and Niklas Süle. Süle threatens with her finger: “Don’t talk to me, I’ll tell you.” Natural processes in a team, but in the documentation of failure they are more important than they should be.
“Fuck off, hey!”
Meanwhile, Flick always seems combative, but also increasingly desperate. The national coach folds his stars during the break in the game against Costa Rica and shouts: “They are blind and you make them strong!” Before that, he swore after the start: “Fuck off, hey!” He also struggles with indiscipline, players’ unpunctuality at meetings, and he complains about a lack of respect. And his ideas are obviously not getting through. In the debriefing of the inexplicably given away opening game against Japan, Kimmich criticized the plan, Flick countered extremely irritably: “Do I speak a different language?”
The scenes from the team meetings consolidate the image of different levels of communication. In one of the meetings, Flick wishes for more passion; he cites the emotional Brazilians as role models. But there is nothing there. The national coach neither hears nor sees the passion. He looks at empty faces, some he doesn’t see at first, his head is so low.
The former hopeful Flick has become a man who is fighting for his job after two years in office. Nevertheless, he tries to remain as calm as possible under the pressure he has put on himself by saying that everything will get better. He doesn’t concern himself with possible expulsion. “That wouldn’t be good advice. I can’t go to the games like that,” Flick told the editorial network Germany, recalling the situation almost 17 years ago. “In the year of the home World Cup, a headline in March read: Black, red and gold bottles! Three months later it said: Now we’re all black, red and horny!”
“A bit indebted to the coach”
After just four wins in the last 16 international matches, Flick announced the end of all experiments, which had brought the already bad mood around the DFB team down again in the spring and even more so in the summer. “The results we achieved should not happen like this,” said Flick. Above all, the way his football players go on the pitch needs to change: “We want them to fight together. The fans also want to see the team start to fight and defend themselves.” It will be a game about the favor of the spectators, about the mood in the country, about the support for the national coach.
But as soon as Flick and the national team came into focus again, discussions broke out again. Union boss Oliver Ruhnert had repeatedly questioned the implementation of the performance principle at Flick, also because he had not yet nominated any Berliners. He had hotly offered clearer Rani Khedira and defender Robin Knoche to the national coach. And after a good second half of the season and a sensational start to the new season, Kevin Behrens also emerged as a solution to the storm problem. Flick ignored all of this (Khedira, the most likely candidate, is injured) and caused even more astonishment when he also disrespected his supposed favorite students Leon Goretzka and Timo Werner. Werner is in crisis at the club, while Goretzka is getting into better and better shape. He was correspondingly sad. Pascal Groß, aged 32, surprisingly made his first appearance in the squad, and Thomas Müller also returns.
“He’s doing it sensationally, at the moment”
At least there still seems to be support for the national coach in player circles. “In the last few months, Hansi Flick has had a lot on his hands. He’s doing it sensationally at the moment,” said the Borussia Dortmund offensive man. He perceives Flick “to be very calm. He is very clear in his speeches. I believe that he knows exactly what he wants, what he demands. That’s how he conveys it,” but he also knows that the results are what matter International matches. “That’s what you’ll be judged on at the end,” said Brandt. And what would happen then? DFB vice-president and BVB boss Hans-Joachim Watzke, who is currently in a demolition mood, says: “You shouldn’t worry about defeats in advance, but you should hope that you win the games. If the two games go wrong, then you should “I would like to ask you again, but ideally Bernd Neuendorf as president, because he has the main responsibility and if it cannot be avoided, you can ask me again.” There doesn’t seem to be time for a clear commitment at the moment.
“We know exactly what is at stake. We are also a bit indebted to the coach because we are the ones who have to go on the pitch and achieve the results,” announced Union Berlin’s first German national player Robin Gosens. Will the resurrection of the DFB team now take place on the goose-gray Mittelland Canal?