Germany has traditionally been a Fußball or soccer powerhouse, they have won almost every tournament they can win; the world cup 4 times, the Confederations Cup, and the European Championship 3 times. But recently they have hit some turmoil and have had a drop in form. After winning the 2014 world cup they got eliminated from the 2018 world cup in the group stages with only one win, and recently a devastating 6-0 loss to Spain.
The person taking the front of the blame has been the Germany coach Joachim "Jogi" Löw. This is because of the anomaly presented when you see that three of the four coaches in the champions league semi-finals are german, the UEFA coach of the year is german, and the last two coaches to win the champions league were German yet the play against Spain was disorganized and sloppy.
The problem also is by no means the players with some of the best young talents in the world being German with Kai Havertz, Timo Werner, Leroy Sane, and Lukas Klostermann being under 25 years of age and having played for the national team. But you also have some veteran players as options with Marco Reus, Manuel Neuer, and Toni Kroos.
So the coaching staff is clearly at fault for the lapse in a form that is normally one of the best going back decades to when Germany won the world cup for the first time in 1954 and a really strong period in the 1990s when Germany sat on top of the Fifa Rankings and won the world cup in 1990. But this is hard for Germany as a whole because Joachim Low had an impressive streak in 2010 with a strong counter-attack method that he then just lost sight of when Germany lost to Serbia in the group stage despite destroying England and Argentina before losing to Spain 1-0 in the semifinals.
So he wanted to be more proactive and got beat before he had to go back to the basics and pulled out 1-0 wins and a 7-1 win over Brazil that took advantage of their self-destructive mess. But then after winning the 2014 world cup they had their earliest exit in 80 years after a humiliating defeat to South Korea 2-0 in the final group stage match. So Low cut Jerome Boateng, Mats Hummels, and Thomas Mueller which was effectively shooting themselves in the foot.
But Germany needs to put this behind them and think about the future with many strong coaching possibilities including Julian Nagelsmann and Hansi Flick who have both taken their teams to at least the semifinals in the Champions League, Julian Nagelsmann’s RB Leipzig lost in the semifinals and Hansi Flick’s Bayern Munchen won the whole tournament.
Julian Naglesmann is a new coach but has serious potential after he reached the highest league in Germany with a team that has only existed for 11 years and he has only been their coach for a mere year and a half since June 21, 2019, but has taken RB Leipzig to the Champions League semifinals for the first time in the club’s history in his first year in charge
He runs a fairly complicated system but it also has clearly worked. It has a build-up rotation where his wing-backs will move up relatively high in the build-up that exploits wide space and creates space centrally that the team can use to move up the field. Then the center backs split wide before the deepest midfielder drops back to offer the person in possession a passing option back. This makes the team vertical which is a key strategy for Nagelsmann who always likes to move the ball forward. Julian Nagelsmann also uses a double pivot which allows versatility between attack and defense which is a new system but one that is proving successful.
Then there is Hansi Flick as the second major option to be the next German national team coach. He was the assistant coach to Joachim Low from August 2006 to July 2014 after the team won the World cup. He is also the current Bayern Munchen coach who took a broken team that was passed on to him from Niko Kovac who mutually agreed to leave the club on November 3rd, 2019 following a 5-1 loss to Eintracht Frankfurt and beat Borussia Dortmund in the first game. Then he went on an impressive unbeaten streak in 2020 and a 9 game winning streak in the champions league including an incredible 8-2 win over Barcelona.
He also plays a very complicated and successful strategy. It includes a 4-2-3-1 formation. He also plays with a rotation of 18 players that have all built confidence and chemistry with each other. Bayern Munchen also has played lots of long balls over the top for the wingers to run on. He also has an incredible defensive plan that allows the team to have the ball the majority of the time. It consists of high pressure to keep the opposition in their half and doubling up on players at the right time. There will be one player on the man with the ball and then when the attacker is vulnerable a second Bayern player crashes in on them and then they are normally able to win the ball two on one that allows Bayern to go on a quick counter-attack.
So with multiple very different but also highly successful strategies, there is no real reason that the German National soccer team should keep putting up with the mess that is Joachim Low. They would benefit from a new coach who could correctly use the immense raw talent in the German National team squad to return to winning ways with Hans-Dieter (Hansi) Flick, Julian Nagelsmann, or one of the other highly successful coaches around the world.