Lothar Matthäus, the former Germany captain turned pundit, has blamed the team’s crushing World Cup defeat by Paraguay in part on the players’ dogged efforts to have their families, even parents, in tow, which he said had led to tension within the team and a lack of concentration on the football.
“While there’s a lot that needs to be processed about what happened on the pitch, what happened off the pitch also needs to be a topic of discussion,” Matthäus said.
The former midfielder captained West Germany to their 1990 World Cup triumph and at the following edition of the tournament in the US. He said the manner in which the players took it for granted that their families would accompany them reminded him of the debate over players’ families in 1994, which he said had proved mightily distracting from the football.
“There were documentaries [made] about this topic in ‘94 [and] I don’t think it was that different this time round,” Matthäus said, talking to the German tabloid Bild. He said having their families with them was “more important for many of [the players] than what took place on the football pitch”.
He said he had little understanding as to why the families were given permission to be there. “I really don’t know why they should be there,” especially for “the first, second and third games”, he said. “They [the players] hadn’t even been in America for two weeks and already their entire families were with them. They could have been flown in for the quarter-finals when the team had actually accomplished something,” he said.
Without naming names he said some players had spent a lot of their time “looking for travel possibilities, booking hotels. This was a topic of discussion in the team. It’s not appeared in the media … but I know that it was a topic of discussion and that one player was cross with another because he was allowed to bring his mum with him. Another was allowed to bring his wife, then the kids were allowed to fly too.”
Some had flown on the team’s plane, he said, “while others had had to take a commercial flight”. As a result “there was a lot of unrest” which was felt in the dressing room, he claimed, “but which was not conveyed to the outside world, but nevertheless the focus was simply not on the World Cup but on this free day to spend with the family and that free day with the family”.
He inferred that what he called a “similar situation” in 1994 had contributed to Germany’s defeat by Bulgaria in the quarter finals.
Matthäus spoke to many Germans by calling the defeat by Paraguay “just too much to bear”. “We didn’t advance, we didn’t deserve to advance, however sad it is to say that,” he said.
The misery felt was reflected across the online headlines in Germany’s media, and was palpable on people’s faces, after almost 18 million sat down to watch the match, despite the 10.30pm CET kick-off.
“There’s nothing left of Germany,” stated a damning headline in Der Spiegel, while an opinion piece it carried, titled “The decline of a once great football nation”, said the miserable result reflected the general demise of Germany, which finds itself in the economic doldrums.
“For the third time in a row, the German national team has been eliminated early from a World Cup tournament, with its third coach,” wrote the columnist Peter Ahrens. “This can no longer be explained by bad luck or chance. It reflects a fundamental problem. And that problem is devastating. Germany, once a great footballing nation, four-time world champion, has shrunk to a footballing minnow. The elimination against Paraguay, as embarrassing as it seems, is actually the new reality for Germany.”
“Nagelsmann gets an F,” stated the tabloid Bild, as it bemoaned the German head coach Julian Nagelsmann’s inability to accept any share of the blame.
Splashed over a photograph of the Germany team arriving at Windsor-Salem, North Carolina (their base) having flown from Boston, was the chilling caption: “The German losers land. Icy mood”.
Matthäus contributed to the mounting criticism of Nagelsmann and the calls for him to go, saying he could not imagine how the 38-year-old could remain as national trainer, telling Bild: “You have to have a new trainer in order to move on.”
Jürgen Klopp, the much-loved former trainer of Liverpool and Borussia Dortmund, did not reject the idea that he could fill Nagelsmann’s shoes. But said he was not ready to throw his hat into the ring.
“I haven’t thought about that yet,” he said, adding he could understand “that when the national coach is being discussed, my name is mentioned in some form”.
As the nation came to terms with the defeat, there was puzzlement over the reaction on X by the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, with many asking whether he had watched the same match as everyone else.
“Even though being eliminated hurts: What a game!” he wrote, adding: “With your dedication and team spirit at this World Cup, you have inspired our country. We are proud of you.”
It led to the phrase “welches spiel?” – which game – to trend on X in Germany.
His attempt to spin what Bild summed up as “slow, boring and lethargic” was even picked up by Russian president Vladimir Putin’s confidant Kirill Dmitriev, who used it as an opportunity to poke fun at Merz, writing on X: “Merz is good at always encouraging a failure.”
Commentators dwelled in particular at their disgust over the Germans’ apparent anxiety to participate in the penalty shoot out. “The players’ fear of failure was written all over their faces,” wrote the left-leaning daily TAZ. For Bild it was a clear case of cowardice.
Jonathan Tah had been forced to take the first penalty of his career and the final, decisive one for Germany, only because other players had first hesitated and then managed to avoid stepping up, it wrote.
“There weren’t enough professionals willing to confidently step up to the penalty spot,” said Bild, adding that it was not the first time “that it became clear the extent to which the team lacked that absolute winning mentality”. The incident was reminiscent of Bayern Munich’s Champions League final defeat by Chelsea in 2012, when numerous players also shied away from taking penalties, it suggested.
England’s German head coach, Thomas Tuchel, has been careful to withhold his thoughts on Germany’s performance. It remains to be seen whether, if he steers England to victory, it could provide some solace for Germany, or merely a dose of schadenfreude for England fans.
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