Like thousands of others with a love of the game, Uli Hesse, whose book, Tor, charts the history of the German game, drifted into coaching a kids' team because his son was involved. The experience gave him an insight, at grassroots level, of the problems the DFB was grappling with in the professional game.
“I got into it the way most coaches got into it in Germany back then; you take your son to training, you watch too many training sessions and somebody will eventually come up to you and say, you seem to have an interest, would you mind (coaching the team)? So you do it.
“But I was shocked how backwards everything was. It was all dads who coached the teams and hardly anyone had proper coaching badges. And it’s funny, I was talking with my son about this just the other day and we were recalling that it was still, in the late 90s, normal to see an under-12 or an under-14 team come out of the dressing room and know exactly who is playing where. These are the full-backs, they are the wingers and so on and that’s how they line up, the tall, strong boys are at the back etc . . .
“So I went and asked the German FA for the proper coaching manuals. Even back then they had more or less all the things that the Dutch did: How to have small teams so that everybody gets time on the ball, it was all there in these journals and things and it was all very interesting.
“What I learned from these coaching guides was things that were pretty logical, that the kids, they want to play, to run around the pitch so whatever you want to do or teach them, think of a game to teach them and I thought, that makes sense but then you go and have a training session and everybody else is running shooting practice that goes on for hours. Some coaches had kids running up stairs to build stamina. It was shocking.”
It was, however, a reflection of what was going on in the senior club and international game where the grip of traditionalists was only finally being loosened.
"People were only really ready for change in the build up to the 2006 World Cup. In the book and also in an article for The Blizzard I use Ralf Rangnick as an example. He had a new approach to the game; not in a way radically new, it was already taught to coaches, coaches like me, through the coaching manuals. But to people outside, to the other coaches at my club or the people who just watched the games, it was totally alien to them."
His fellow coaches mockingly nicknamed Rangnick “The Professor” after he illustrated a detailed answer to a fairly basic question on a tactics board while a guest on a popular German TV show. The then 40-year-old coach of Ulm 1846 was just the first of a new breed who thought differently about the game and who would, over time, change the way, just about everybody else did too.
