The Anatomy of Germany’s World Cup Disaster

This really happened, huh?

Soccer is wildly unpredictable, and the rest of the world keeps getting better — that was the premise for my prediction, and from 50,000 feet, it’s the explanation for why the defending World Cup champs got dumped out in the group stage Wednesday.

Over three games, the Germans took 72 shots — 15 more than any other team in the tournament. They created 57 chances — 16 more than anyone else. (For reference, Iran created just 10 chances combined in three games.) And yet they scored just two goals in three games. In another year, one or two or three more shots find the back of the net, there’s a ricochet off a defender’s leg or a deflection off the right side of the post, and Jogi Löw’s team is still alive.

Then there was the group. There seem to be fewer and fewer easy games with each passing World Cup, and Group F epitomized that. Mexico’s roster is flush with players who ply their trade in Europe’s top leagues, and they’re coached by a meticulous, curious, data-fluent manager in Juan Carlos Osorio. Sweden finished ahead of the Netherlands in their qualifying group, and then knocked out Italy in a playoff. And while South Korea came into the tournament as the fourth-worst team per FiveThirtyEight’s SPI, they still had Son Heung-min, the game-breaking winger for Tottenham who’s scored 26 goals and assisted 12 more over the last two Premier League seasons.

The 2018 FIFA World Cup

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All told, the Germans created as many expected goals as they conceded, while Mexico (plus-0.2) and Sweden (plus-0.8) were just slightly ahead. In another tournament, the goals for and against line up in Germany’s favor. But a shoulder shrug at the bloodless nature of randomness just doesn’t suffice here; the Germans shouldn’t have similar underlying numbers to Sweden and Mexico.

After all, this is freaking Germany! You know, the team that’s made the quarterfinals of every World Cup since 1950 — when they were banned from the tournament because World War II had just ended and the country was still occupied by France and the Soviet Union. War is the only thing that’s been able to stop them this early on.

As Gary Lineker said, the Germans are supposed to be the constant amid the chaos that is 22 men trying to transfer a ball into a goal without using their hands. Every winner needs a bit of luck, sure, but the Germans were supposed to be above luck. So how the hell did this happen?

1. They tried to be a club team — and they’re not.

Coming into the tournament, Germany and Spain stood out from the rest of the field because of the way they approached the game. They both wanted to stretch the defense across the field with sustained possession and they wanted to win the ball back as soon as they lost it. Before the start of the World Cup, only Spain created more chances from moves of 10 passes or more and won possession in the opposition third more often than the Germans. Deep possession and pressing — that’s how the best club teams on the planet play, but both of those things require an incredible amount of teamwide coordination and practice.

While the Germans were able to push all 11 players into the opposition half and possess the ball for most of their three games — they had over 65 percent of the ball in every match — it all fell apart as soon as there was a turnover. Check out the lack of defensive actions down the center of the field in both the Mexico and Korea matches. (An orange “x” marks a failed tackle.)

Germany allowed only 560 passes to be completed against them over the three games, while they averaged 581 completed passes … per game! But no matter who was partnering with Toni Kroos in midfield, the team lacked any transitional defensive presence whatsoever in each game. As a result, the center backs were often left to cover nearly half of the field by themselves. Against Korea, Mats Hummels and Niklas Süle were stretched so far apart:

To put it another way, the Germans’ opponents averaged one shot per 17.5 passes completed. They didn’t see much of the ball, but once they got it, the path toward Manuel Neuer was wide open.

2. They took terrible shots.

You can generate as many shots as you want, but it doesn’t matter if there isn’t someone to finish them off inside the box. Despite all of the possession and all of the chances, the Germans weren’t able to create anything easy. The took just two shots from inside the 6-yard box, while Sweden, who took just over half Germany’s total number of shots, doubled the amount from inside the 6.

In Russia, the Germans were a late-’90s NBA team, running down the shot clock and settling for an off-balance fadeaway from 15 feet:

Much of that is a byproduct of their dominance in possession and their weakness out of it. Mexico, Sweden, and Korea were able to pack numbers behind the ball and limit access to the penalty area because they knew they could still generate some attacking oomph without leaving too many bodies upfield.

But the toothlessness also comes down to the lack of goal-scoring on the roster. It might seem like it, but you can’t just plug anyone into a lineup loaded with world-class passers and expect them to score. What makes great goal-scorers great is their movement off the ball. They’re not picking out the upper corner from 25 yards out on a consistent basis; no, they’s sneaking to the penalty spot whenever they can. Lionel Messi finished off his goal against Nigeria with the close control of a video game set to “Beginner,” but the chance never would have even happened without his wide-receiver-quality route running:

Germany came into the tournament with three players who averaged at least 0.25 expected assists per 90 minutes over the past club season: Mesut Özil, Thomas Müller, and Toni Kroos. But they didn’t have one player who hit 0.5 expected goals. (Argentina and Brazil each have three, while England, Uruguay, and France each have two.) Löw chose only two strikers for his 23-man roster: Timo Werner, who scored 13 goals in the Bundesliga, and Mario Gómez, who scored just eight. Werner played all but four minutes in the group stages, and was able to generate only seven shots despite the constant barrage his team created. In hindsight, he was a strange stylistic fit, as his club team typically plays on the counterattack and averaged only around 54 percent possession this past year. He rarely sees so many defenders inside the box.

With opponents incentivized to defend and a squad devoid of goals, Germany’s only scores came from a deflection off of Marco Reus’s knee and a one-in-100 Toni Kroos free kick.

3. They didn’t develop.

As I wrote about last week, not much has changed from 2014, or even 2010. Toni Kroos, Sami Khedira, Thomas Müller, Mesut Özil, Mario Gómez, Manuel Neuer, and Jérôme Boateng were all on the roster eight years ago, and they all played key minutes throughout the group stage in 2018. The roster didn’t have any consistent starters in the 25-to-28 range — typically the peak years for a professional soccer player.

There were reports of a locker-room divide — the supposed “bling-bling gang” vs. the Bavarians. And the fault lines supposedly formed around Löw’s decision not to select Leroy Sané for the squad. Löw said Sané failed to “connect” with his teammates, but the decision spoke to what was an ultimately fatal complacency from the manager. Sané had 10 goals and 15 assists in Manchester City’s record-breaking Premier League campaign, and he averaged nearly three completed dribbles per game. Werner looked most effective at the World Cup when Löw shifted him out wide against Sweden, but what if he’d had Sané, an actual game-breaking winger, playing on that wing instead of a muffled striker searching for influence? Germany averaged just 8.7 completed dribbles per game, barely more than Iran, and only slightly more than half of Brazil’s average. They needed someone who could unsettle a packed-in defense with the ball at his feet — and, well, they had him; the manager just decided not to bring him.

Without Sané, we saw a team that could pass the ball up and across the field but withered as soon as they progressed into the final third or lost possession. Over the past four years, Löw never integrated prime-age players into the squad. As the midfield was torn to shreds, Juventus’s Emre Can watched from home. He’s 24 and has spent the past two years making tackles and intercepting passes at the heart of Liverpool’s midfield. Surely he could’ve provided some resistance — or at least something more than the near nothing they got from 31-year-old Khedira.

After Germany’s group-stage elimination, the past three champions — first Italy, then Spain — have all failed to qualify for the round of 16. With France also failing in 2002, it’s four of the past five. Maybe that’s just a quirk, or maybe there’s a lesson here.

“I believe that the cycle of a successful team lasts maybe four years, and then some change is needed,” Sir Alex Ferguson, who won 13 Premier League titles and two Champions League trophies at Manchester United, said in an interview in 2012. “So we tried to visualize the team three or four years ahead and make decisions accordingly.”

As Davin O’Dwyer wrote for Slate in 2014, Spain’s Vicente del Bosque ignored that advice. Four years later, so did Jogi Löw.