There may be various reasons for the suspicion that resonates in Robin Gosens' descriptions of the only day he spent in one of the highly acclaimed youth training centers (NLZ) for talented footballers. The national player, who became the football nation's favorite hero with his intoxicating European Championship appearance against Portugal and who will meet England this Tuesday (6 p.m. in the FAZ live ticker for the European Football Championship, on ARD and MagentaTV), is an ardent supporter of FC Schalke , he had to break a taboo after being invited to the trial training of Borussia Dortmund's U 16s and wear his arch-rival's training clothes.
“Of course I had to stand over it now”, he writes in his autobiography “Dreaming is worth it”. When it started, the players and coaches didn't seem particularly warm or seriously interested. Perhaps Gosens himself wasn't exactly open to the black and yellow scenery he'd gotten into.
In any case, the whole action turned into a disaster and the basic antipathy towards BVB intensified the bad feelings he brought with him from his visit to Dortmund.
Gosens was intimidated, he did not understand the exercises, "there was no one to hold onto, I had no idea and felt left alone," he remembers.
Between the lines, the story of that day in April 2011 sounds like a criticism of this kind of professionalized youth football.
"I say: thank God!"
One of the Dortmund players was Marvin Ducksch at the time, now at Hannover 96. Koray Günter, who is under contract with Hellas Verona in Serie A, was also on the pitch. But only Gosens became a Champions League and EM star. Without training in a NLZ, which started a debate about the work in the professionally supervised youth departments of the major German clubs after the rousing EM show of the winger.
“Robin Gosens never played in a youth academy and only found his way into professional football via detours. I say: Thank God! ", The former national coach Berti Vogts writes in a column on T-online.de and continues:" If Gosens had gone to a youth training center at 14, he would not be as special today as he is now is ”, because: In the NLZ“ individual talent is not promoted, but the general public of the young top players is brought to a common level. (...) We don't need robots, we need special people. "
If you look around a little, you will find other players who fell through the narrow grid of talent scouts and still became stars. Footballers who were still playing in the A-youth in villages before anyone realized they could be good enough for a professional career. The 43-time national player Jonas Hector from 1. FC Köln, for example, who played for SV Auersmacher until he was 20 years old. Or the Dutchman Wout Weghorst from VfL Wolfsburg; in England there is Jamie Vardy from Leicster City, whose biography is angular and marked by missteps. Indeed, all of these charismatic professionals fit Vogts' attribute "special".
Gosens' unconventional style of play can not only enrich any team, but also sweep them away. Weghorst stands out with his energy and willpower, and Hector decided, despite the possibility of a career at Champions League level, for a future at 1. FC Köln and to retire from the national team.
However, Thomas Eichin considers Vogt's subliminal assertion that such players are reprogrammed from “special people” to “robots” in the training company of the professional clubs to be controversial. It is “too general to say that idiosyncratic types like Robin Gosens do not develop in the junior performance centers,” says the head of the Bayer Leverkusen NLZ. In fact, there are a lot of players who became very strong characters in the classic training process. Thomas Müller, Joshua Kimmich or Emre Can from the German EM squad, for example.