In Germany, football is the dominant sport. Ten percent of the German population are members of the German Football Association, DFB. The world’s largest sports federation.
The Bundesliga, the top league in German football has 18 teams with over 500 registered players. When your talent pool is in the millions, you don’t have a supply problem. Even when your talent development system is at a rate of less than 1% of throughput (1% percent of 1 million is 10,000).
A bad loss at the last World Cup. Declining membership numbers. And the Bundesliga increasingly buying skillful foreign players at the expense of homegrown talent suggests that although there is no supply problem, yet. There might have a quality problem.
But, German football has been here before. Boom follows bust.
Big ideas are the stuff of boom and bust. And they require three things. A narrative, some data to support the new narrative, and a new way of doing things.
Inventor Matthias Lockmann has proposed to constrain the involvement of coaches, encouraging players to develop game intelligence, rather than learn through overly prescribed solutions provided by coaches.
Dominance and predictability are appealing in a competitive world. And perhaps it is valid to question the link between increasing coaching structures and decreasing participation and activities levels. The industrialization of sport has seen the rise of the entrepreneurial coach in the same period as declining activity levels.
But, perhaps the biggest challenge faced by German football is to embrace continual development. Crawl, Walk, Run.
In Crawl, propositional and procedural knowledge works just fine. “Do this, don’t do that.” But to move to Walk requires perspectival knowledge. Perspectival knowledge is about testing your ideas, and concepts, in different environments and contexts. The reward is a nuanced understanding of how your concept works. The downside is unpredictability.
If you want flexible players capable of making decisions based on their task and environment then you need to provide an example worth copying. Be the change you seek.
I wish German Football and Matthias well.