Germany through, why is German football thriving at the moment?

With Germany through to the Semi Finals of Euro 2016, I'm going to be taking a look at one of the main reasons that their side thrives, their youth system. I'm going to be taking a look deeper into how their youth system works and what we can learn from it. Germany have some of the forests young talents in the world and they appear to keep on producing, let's see how they do it.

The DFB
The DFB is the German football association, and they have helped tremendously in providing young stars for the German national side. Their changes all began after a poor performance in Euro 2000 which saw Germany finish bottom of their group. They therefore decided to go back and develop their youth system in an attempt to better the quality of younger players breaking into their side. The way the DFB did this is by introducing a talent development program in 2003 which was set up in 366 areas of Germany and was ran by nearly 1000 volunteers, and it was aimed to improve the skill and technical ability of 8-14 year olds showing potential to be some of the worlds next best players. Since this time the talent development program has worked with over half of the German national side, showing the positive impact of this work at a young age. They do not help anyone whoever and it must be the elite who are scouted. Every volunteer of the 1000 for example must be a trained uefa B level coach, and must scout the players as well as train them to become Germany's next stars.

The number of high level coaches Germany has is phenomenal in comparison to the likes of England and is worth comparing, Germany have around 30,000 uefa B level coaches compared to England 5000 and have around 1500 coaches with a pro license compared to England's 150, so obviously there is a larger number of young players getting much better coaching. The system is also completely contrasting to England's as England let clubs scout and sign and train players to pick for the national side, whereas Germany train their players nationally and then let clubs scout from that stage of their development, meaning the players are much more aware and dedicated to their national team as its a mean of them being successful , rather than English players who may know they have a good club to fall back on if their international career doesn't flourish.

The other important thing to consider is money, bringing though your own talented players is much cheaper than spending huge amounts of money on overseas stars, which is what Premier League clubs tend to do, in the bundesliga around 50% of players are homegrown and this isn't the most in Europe with the Netherlands Eredivisie on 68.5 % but still it is better than England who sit lowest out of the 6 major European leagues with 36.5% of players playing at clubs being homegrown. This stat alone shows that it is no wonder England are so commonly underperforming on the international stage.

Overall Germany's improvements to youth football have incredibly improved results ! And England should certainly slowly move towards making these huge changes to their footballing system ! Germany are on course to win another Euros title ! And fair play to them, the turn around they have made since 2000 is phenomenal.