Eight lessons rock-bottom Brazil need to learn from the best
By Simon Kuper in São Paulo
July 9, 2014 5:57 pm

Team must not let a good crisis go to waste – it is time to mimic the German revolution

Ten years ago this week, the German team was at rock bottom. It had exited Euro 2004 without beating anyone, not even Latvia. Germany’s sorry side served chiefly as raw material for German comedians. Nobody even seemed willing to become national coach. That week I asked Jürgen Klinsmann what was wrong with Germany. “We don’t have a killer up front,” he smiled. “We are still making the mistake of passing sideways. The lack of speed may be another reason.” I asked if he might become coach of Germany. “No!”

Three weeks later, Klinsmann became coach of Germany. He and his assistant Joachim Löw ditched tradition and revolutionised the way Germans play football. Just before this World Cup, Klinsmann, now coaching the US, eulogised the new German team to the magazine Elf Freunde: “These high-speed players with their technique, who can play furious attacking football with fast positional changes. Everything that we scribbled in theory on flipcharts in 2004 has become reality.” Tuesday’s 7-1 hammering of Brazil in the semifinal possibly even qualifies as hyperreality.

Now a Brazil at rock bottom needs to revolutionise the way it plays football. Here are eight lessons from Germany:

1. Never let a crisis go to waste. You will never have greater consensus to rethink everything in your football than now. In German parlance, this is “zero hour”.

2. Your past is irrelevant. Brazil’s five world titles mean nothing today. They serve only to kid you that you are still good at football. Your aim must be to play like Germany 2018, not Brazil 1970.

3. Don’t blame individuals. Brazilian fans on Tuesday night were jeering poor, hapless Fred, but it is not his fault that he was arguably the country’s best striker. The system has failed. Fred is only a symptom.

4. The most important thing in football is the pass. It is not the dribble, or passion, or psychology. The Germans obsess about the geometry of passing. Brazil, by contrast, no longer thinks seriously about tactics, which is why coach Felipe Scolari and the Brazilian media spent half the tournament obsessing about the players’ penchant for tears.

5. Learn from the best countries. Accept that you no longer understand how to play football. The Germans from 2004 learned passing from the Dutch and Spaniards, pace of play from the English Premier League, minority recruitment from the French and fitness from Americans.
6. The corollary: you probably need a foreign coach. Klinsmann was a German but a longtime expatriate who had ended up in California. Brazil should have asked the Spaniard Pep Guardiola to coach them in the World Cup, as Ronaldo suggested. Hire a European now.

7. Set the bar at number one. For Germany or Brazil, the only aim is to be the world’s best. At Euro 2008, a young German team reached the final, where they were passed off the park by Spain. Germany’s coach Löw did not congratulate himself on finishing second. Instead he thought: “I want a team like that,” and began working out how to become like Spain.

8. You will not immediately become good but you can almost immediately become professional. Germany leads football in nutrition, statistics, physical preparation and so on. Brazil must aim to match that.

Brazil has a harder route to reform than Germany did. The German football federation, with 6.85m members, is the largest single-sport association on earth. Brazil has no comparable central power to push change at all levels. Brazil does have a lone genius, Neymar, who sometimes serves to disguise Brazilian football’s malaise. (Lionel Messi has the same retarding effect on Argentina.) And geographically, Brazil is poorly connected to cutting-edge football countries.

All this impedes learning. But there can be no excuse for turning up in Russia in 2018 (presuming Brazil qualify) with talk of 1970 and jogo bonito. That’s dead.
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