Goalkeeper crisis in German Football?
German Football struggles with next generation goalies
Since I am watching football and I do this since centuries (ahem decades....) we Germans were known at least for great goal keepers. We always had super stars as goalie even the rest of the team played shit lol. Currently it seems there is no real top goalie coming up so the times after Manuel Neuer and Marc-André ter Stegen might be a tough one for Team Germany - apart from the other crisis areas the team currently has. We have been excellent in our talent work during the last 20 years but other countries took over in the meantime. England and Belgium look extremely strong, no doubt about France. A fantastic defense with a great goalkeeper is the basis for success in Football.
Our country has a reputation to lose - Neuer was appointed world goalkeeper from 2013 to 2017 but the gap behind is huge - Marc-Andre ter Stegen had some strong performances but what is next? Not a lot! Kevin Trapp returned to Frankfurt after he became only number three goalie in Paris and the other usual suspects such as Bernd Leno, Loris Karius seem to have a lot problems in their performance right now. Is there any goalkeeper from Germany in the youth teams that might fill that gap?
Interestingly when I search for top goalkeeper in Germany Google comes up with the top 5 Germans playing in the NHL which is Ice hockey lol - that might be a sign that there are some things going wrong.
Will Team Germany get back to old Strength!?
I have no doubt that Germany will come back! They were living on a dream the past year and fell of the cloud during the world cup!
New blood will have the come to the national team, building a new squad which could last for 2 world cup. The problem, according to me, was that after winning the world cup, the squad was kept together and no new youngsters were blend in. Now some of the key players of the world cup winner in 2014 are starting to go back in quality and new youngsters are ready to step up.
This is common for almost every country who does win the world cup, they are keeping the squads too long.
That's why it was a great decision of Martinez for Belgium to leave Radja out of the squad and give Tielemans some more playing time. He has to become the back bone of the new generation!
And it could be worse, look at Italy :)
Agree - however we had great young players but the manager did not use them and did stick to older underperformers.