Directors move to stop exodus of young players from german leagues

 

DUSSELDORF – Four sporting directors in German professional football have called for a drastic reduction of youth player transfers in the country which take place on a much larger scale than elsewhere and are not doing the game any good.

Klaus Allofs from second division club Fortuna Düsseldorf said at a roundtable event on Wednesday night organized by the Rheinische Post paper that statistics gathered by the German Football League show “we are one of the countries that don’t do as well” as others in this area.

“There are disproportionately more transfers in our performance centres than in countries where it works well. So you can already assume that it would often do players good to stay at clubs for a longer period,” Allofs said.

Cologne sporting director Christian Keller said: “I’m really annoyed by this switching of players in youth football.

“Even 13-year-old alleged super-talents are paid a lot of money, but don’t necessarily end up at the highest level.”

Keller added his club had decided that “there is only pocket money up to the U19 level. For some a little, for some a little better. But no one can make a living from it.”

Simon Rolfes from Bayer Leverkusen said that “there is a free choice of clubs and we will not set that to zero. But we have to think about what possibilities there are to contain and reduce that.

“It makes no sense for one to go from the south to the west in youth and one from the west to the south. That does not lead to success,” the Leverkusen sporting director said. Borussia Mönchengladbach’s Roland Virkus appealed for solidarity among the clubs on the issue.

“That would do the market good and calm it down,” he said. “We all have to question ourselves on that.”