Why Germany Have Been The Best Team At EURO 2024 (So Far)

Why Germany Have Been The Best Team At EURO 2024 (So Far)

Good Morgan or knocked or whenever you’re watching this Eon Adam cley out 442 see that was pretty good and we are here today to finally finally talk about Germany now full disclosure here mine FRS we were going to do a video about how good Germany were after the Scotland game but I mentioned this to a Scotland pile of mine and their exact words were it was only us so we thought we’d at least wait until they did in Hungary and of course due in Hungary they have and they’ve done it with precisely the same 11 they did in Scotland with so it is now time to give Germany whatever the German word for flowers is right then so nlman went with an unchanged team it was Bloom by the way I went and looked that up and it was this same 11 that started against Scotland and I don’t think he’s going to make many changes to that throughout this tournament that’s because fundamentally it gives them an incredible amount of balance from Back to Front you’ve got youth you’ve got experience you’ve got direct players you’ve got neat and tidy players and it’s working so far brilliantly so we’ve got them set up in a 42 31 shape here but they played two games in the tournament now you’ll have seen them they are never usually in this shape especially when they’re not on the ball there are a number of rotations that make this sing so primarily one of the main concerns people had about this German side going in was that both musala and vert they like to play too much in the center they could endend up crowding the whole situation when Germany on the attack but that’s been fine so far they’re both getting in that Central Area so they’re leaving a lot of space here and of course unlike Club football which is now apparently just full of nerds they have two proper fullbacks in kimick and the lad whose name I always mispronounce and they are the ones providing all of the width down the flanks and then from there the two center backs split to cover all the space Tony Cru drops onto the same line as them more on him in a second and Robert andr here might currently be the most underappreciated player at this entire tournament and we’re not going to get into him too much during all of this but you can just see here by using your human eyes Germany are often committing up to six players in attack here this is il K gundan they’ve got Cru doing the playmaking at the back with the two center backs and because Manuel noer is not doing his occasional trick of playing on the left wing for some reason he’s got all of this see see this this space between the attack and the defense this should be a catastrophic problem with the German system but it isn’t because of Robert andri but the thing is this isn’t a massive surprise like nles hasn’t turned up at this tournament with this crazy system nobody’s seen before a lot of the buildup games had Germany playing pretty much exactly the same way and yet still people had written them off for this tournament so why suddenly are they being talked about as potential winners one of the reasons is because in the two games we have seen so far nobody has had an answer to what is going on in this back three now the eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed I put Tony Cru here but that’s not actually where he’s playing we always see Center midfielders if they drop back in between the central Defenders they do it in the middle because it gives them like the biggest sort of view of the pitch but that’s not what Tony Cru has been doing he in fact has been dropping out to the left Central back Central back Center back this this bit Yeah so tar and rudiger they don’t sort of split necessarily they just move across leaving this part of the pitch free for him here and that’s quite Innovative because it stops teams that like to press you from really pressing you like I just Tri what I mean by that right let’s take this little man here and pop him as a lone Center forward in this system now imagine this player here is some ball playing Central midfielder who’s dropped back to get in possession now you press him you put him under pressure all he can do really is either beat you risky because you might get in score or go to the two center backs who obviously are not going to be as good on the ball as he is but let’s say instead you put your ball player right here it gives a whole different set of problems to our low and Center forward cuz if he does press you then yes you can go back to the central Defender who probably doesn’t want it but you can still play up the pitch there’s still passing angles directly in front of you and if he kills his run for one reason or another that doesn’t really help but also if you do manage to go around him and open up that space you’ve not only got the whole pitch in front of you but it’s much less risky because if you give that away well he’s all the way out here and we’ve seen this plenty already in both the Scotland and the Hungary game teams just don’t really want to be going out in that space to press one player so have haven’t really known what to do with Tony Cruz as a result he’s spending a lot of time on the ball now this is his pass map from that Hungary game and you can see obviously gets into the Central Area when they’ve got the ball when hungry defending deep he likes to get into this area and make things happen but just look at the concentration of passes in this sort of left Center back area like Germany have already scored seven goals in this tournament and so many of them have involved a contribution in some capacity from Tony Cruz in this position like in the buildup to the hungry game right before that killer pass splits those two lines look who it is and look how much space he’s found himself in in this part of the pitch but the real real key to what Germany have been doing at this tournament is not that just one player is getting on the ball it’s what’s happening ahead of him when he’s got this space we just go back to sort of that original 42 31 thing right I’m going to Overlay Germany’s average positions from the Scotland game on this one of the main things you’re going to notice here is how advanced the fullback like was saying before they’re the two that are providing all the width but the four main attacking players H gundan vert and musala they’re all pretty much right on top of each other in this graph now okay maybe that’s got something to do with the fact Scotland played the majority of the match with only 10 men ends up just being a bit of a mess not a great representation of how they normally play okay well this is the exact same chart from the Hungary game and you’ll see the exact same thing again like the width is coming from kimick and middle stats here got it in the end but you could even throw a smaller towel over the four attacking players here on this average graph they coming out is more or less in the exact same position and to understand that we must literally only have to understand what an average is like this graph isn’t showing that they’re playing in exactly the same position that they’re all constantly on top of each other it’s that they’re moving around so much from left to right from front to back that when you average that out across 90 minutes it just kind of comes out in the middle all right if that still doesn’t make sense then just think about it this way right this this is Jamal musial’s heat map from the hungry game and you can see that while his favored position is on the left hand side slightly in sort of the half space cuz he’s not holding the width we knew that already you’ll see that there are contributions touches passes little things here and there across the entire remaining width of the pitch he’s got the freedom to go pretty much anywhere he wants likewise Florian wood you can see he does loads of his work in that right hand channel in that right hand half space where he wants to be but also he is free to come all the way across the left hand side to go deeper to go long to go pretty much anywhere in the final third so if you put point a which is that Tony Cruz has found a new sort of dimension of Freedom by playing in this left Center back role and combine that with point two or B I can’t remember what I originally said that the forward players have near total freedom to go wherever they want what does that give you well mine guten friends it gives you a team whose movement has been an absolute nightmare for all of their opponents to try and deal with Scotland completely dropped Brown triout at the very sight of it and even Hungary who put up a good fight who had far more to offer go any other way could not live with it right sorry we lost all the footage for the end of this video for some reason so here I am back on a Saturday tiny violin to re-record it but just wanted to explain that in case you wondered why my clothes suddenly changed and I developed this sick fade but right yes I think what my point was was a few seconds later in this sequence during the hung game Germany have successfully recycled it they’ve moved it from left to right they have pulled the Defenders every single which way and gundan as a result is able to pop up in this improbable amount of space there’s running from the left back that takes one of the Defenders away the other attackers drop off so the Defenders aren’t sure whether they should stay or they should go there’s an incisive pass from Cru and the whole point I was making two days ago bears fruit but while this is good and a useful example of what I’m talking about you will never see a better example of this whole thing where working in perfect orchestral Harmony than in the second goal during the Scotland game now if you only saw the highlights from that game you probably missed this because it was in open play in the buildup to the goal actually quite a while before it happened Tony Cruz gets on the ball and Scotland as they were afraid to do the whole match do not go out to press him and he finds himself with a little bit of time and a little bit of space now step one here Kai havit who’s playing as the center forward shows really short for Tony Cru he offers him a ball into feet now very L the Scottish Defender does what you or I would do in that situation you can’t just let Kai hav it go so he follows him into that space creating this hole here now step two the space having opened up musala peels off his Defender breaks into it and if Tony Cruz spots this or Fancy’s playing that pass they’re already in and this right here is why I think team should be so afraid of Germany because they mess this up Cru doesn’t spot the pass the opportunity goes a begging but the system keeps on working that run that muala made wasn’t taken advantage of but the space his run created then gives an opportunity to somebody else two separate players then spot the opportunity crash into the space that is now available and because there’s so much movement going on and Scotland can’t pass over or organize or reset themselves the players make individual decisions to either go with or stay and it becomes bedum now it’s a great bit of individual skill to turn the man and then make the opportunity happen but that nice straight set Scottish defensive line which you would not normally be able to play through now is it like a 90° Angle now it’s still not a gimme from this position it’s going to take a great pass to create the chance but this is the German national side they have no shortage of players who can play that great pass this is the thing about International Football right none of this is particularly groundbreaking or mindblowing like yes they’ve got a player who’s great on the ball who moves into a slightly unusual position and they’ve got this array of attacking Talent who can interchange and link up and go wide and come Central and do lots of nice things with their movement but it’s not overly complex if this was Club football this would get figured out relatively quickly but what makes it so good at International level is just that it’s a relatively simple concept that gets the best out of a number of good players and thus far looks to be effective and that’s the thing about these tournaments like it’s usually the team with that really simple but effective idea that goes all the way in the tournament that whisper it wins it but still we’re not getting carried away here we should urge a note of caution like even by the admission of Scottish fans that first game was only against Scotland in the Hungary game it was a very professional performance but they still did look occasionally vulnerable on the transition which is what a lot of people thought they were killy’s heel was going to be going into the thing now that’s where a lot of teams thought they might be able to get some Joy against Germany because when muala and vert come inside it gets very congested they commit a lot of players forward and leaves them with only one person in the center holding this whole thing together and because musala and ver are dribblers of the ball they like to run into traffic you can turn that over and when you do you’ve done it in exactly the kind of spaces where you’re going to want to attack them but then again if my grandm had Wheels she would have been a far heart so it’s kind of a Nonpoint at this stage but then Counterpoint to my own counter point for all there is an apparent weakness in this system Germany appear to be one of the only teams at the tournament so far who really have a system like you saw all the problems England have had getting the right personnel and getting the right thing going Portugal look fairly static and not really sure what to do with Ronaldo Italy are just Italy all over again but Germany really feel like they all know what they’re doing and they all know it’s going to work before I go one small point on Kai har here because I do think he deserves a special mention in amongst all of this the kind of one question mark hanging over this 11 going into the tournament was whether you were going to have sort of the not a striker pretending to be a striker Kai H or the striker who absolutely loves to be a striker ful crug but you’ve seen in two games already H is doing it all now we just look at his combined heat map from the tournament so far and yeah he is dropping off he’s going wide he’s getting into the number 10 rooll he’s creating those important pockets of space for his teammates to flourish but also look in the box but boom that’s a real striker in the room anyway I’ve got no idea how this video will perform on a German YouTube audience so if you are from the land of socks and sandals please do give it a little bit of love let us know in the comments and whatever language you feel like how you feel about Germany’s chances at the tournament so far have you been impressed by them this is just sort of the level they’re playing against do tougher tests a weit we would dearly honestly truly like to hear every word of it and if I’m at least half right and Germany are going to go do something in this tournament this won’t be the last time we’re talking about them so please do consider subscribing to us here on YouTube if we do get a whole raft of German Subs we’ll probably do some more Germany videos so you can help us build that audience which is a very nice thing for you to do thanks or alternatively if you just want to go and tell me how bad my pronunciations of all those German words were I’m available on social media for you at any website you choose at the following address and I also like to hear from people there because I don’t if you figured this out from watching any videos before but I am an only child if you don’t give me attention I will die 442 socials are in the corner of the video and just wait there one second the latest issue of the magazine the Euros Special Edition T is on sale now from all good retailers although I’m told not in Germany but you can download it on Das iPad until next time though I have been Adam cley this is 442 and off the my friends I’m 90% sure that means goodbye it was on an old TV show lers

With maximum points and 7 goals from their opening 2 games, Germany have moved from Euro 2024 outsiders to probable favourites. But rather than this just being a simple case of never writing them off, Julian Nagelsmann has got his team playing a staggeringly effective brand of football that’s getting the most out of a talented side. From the clever use of Toni Kroos, to the next evolution of Kai Havertz, Adam Clery explains how they’ve done it.

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