n a lazy Sunday afternoon in Berlin, while the rest of the city sinks into summery lethargy, Uli Hesse is hard at work in the offices of 11 Freunde. Once seen as the German version of When Saturday Comes, 11 Freunde has grown into a brilliant monthly “Magazin für Fußballkultur”. Hesse says: “We’re completing our World Cup issue and it’s been interesting looking at the national team.
“There are lots of doubts within German football but, if you include the Confederations Cup, then Germany has made the semi-final of a major tournament eight times in a row. Every time since 2005 is incredible – and unprecedented even for Germans. Our great team from the 1970s never did anything like that. So the mind boggles.”
There should be an even greater collective boggling of minds among supporters of the other 31 World Cup countries when hearing the former internationals Thomas Hitzlsperger and Lars Ricken echo Hesse after he addresses the “complicated and difficult conversations” rippling through German football.
From the outside this strange uncertainty is initially hard to fathom. Germany arrive at the World Cup as the defending champions and last summer, in Russia, they won the Confederations Cup with a young squad as their manager, Joachim Löw, rested established players including Manuel Neuer, Mats Hummels, Mesut Özil and Thomas Müller. Löw has even excluded Leroy Sané, after his blistering season for Manchester City, from the World Cup. If Germany are tussling with doubt, what hope remains for most other nations?
“The national team is playing really well and the management is excellent. But we have to rethink how we compete. You can’t help notice that, with young players, English football is doing really well. France are producing very good players. We have to keep up with them. We’re constantly asking ourselves: ‘Are we doing the right thing? Should we change something?’ And, in the Bundesliga, it’s quite worrying.”
The 36-year-old occupies a challenging position at VfB Stuttgart. “I’ve got two roles. I’m the academy director and also a member of the executive committee. With the way German football and our club is structured we’ve got 62,000 members and I’m leading that with the president and one of my colleagues.”