It is popularly said that football is the most beautiful thing in the world.
Kassel – But it is changing in almost all facets. This week we have dedicated ourselves to various topics with the series “The Development of Football”. To conclude, we put forward seven theses on the future of this sport.
These 1: The number of international competitions will increase. Fans in Europe just have to get used to the Conference League. But it won’t stop there. Both at club and national team level, the associations will do everything in their power to develop new sources of money – this is only possible through new competitions. It would not be a surprise if there would soon be a more pompous successor to the Confederations Cup, which will run until 2017.
These 2: The stadiums will continue to be full. Even if some fans are increasingly turning away from professional football – the stadiums are not emptying as a result. The sport will lose its emotional value, and those who attend the Games will not associate a decade-long history with the club. Stadium tourism is the future. And because the entertainment value is there, there will always be enough people to buy tickets.
These 3: The national team can be beaten for years. Perhaps the biggest problem facing the German national team at the moment: the players are fed up. The appearance of the DFB team at the EM was once again tired, listless and dispassionate. The German footballers all earn a lot of money. Which is because there is quality. But this quality alone is not enough. The EM has shown that anyone who appears as a team and fights for their country will be successful even without the absolute top professionals. Or maybe because of that. That is why the opposite Franz-Beckenbauer sentence from 1990 will apply to the German national team: We will be defeatable for years to come. It is quite possible that the players will only rediscover their passion when they no longer live in complete abundance.
These 4: Even more technical aids are used. Offside? Handball? Foul or not foul? As a matter of course, controversial scenes are checked by a video referee. The development is just beginning. At some point, the position of a player and the ball will have to be determined so precisely that it will be clarified in seconds whether there was contact with the hand, whether there was a foul and whether an attacker was offside. The technical innovations will help to revolutionize the amateur sector too.
These 5: Professional football is running out of idols. You can think what you want of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi – the Portuguese and the Argentine have made an outstanding contribution to football for more than a decade. The successors of legends like Pele, Franz Beckenbauer, Zico, Diego Maradona, Lothar Matthäus and Zinédine Zidane, Nur: What comes next? Our answer: nothing nearly equivalent. It is true that above-average footballers always excel – like Mbappé, Haaland, Neymar and Lewandowski. But in terms of versatility, they cannot replace Ronaldo and Messi.
These 6: The national top leagues are looking for markets outside of Europe. In the area of merchandising and marketing, top European clubs such as FC Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Manchester United and FC Barcelona have been on the road in different parts of the world for a long time. The day will come when Bayern’s Bundesliga opener will not be played in Munich, but in the USA or China.
These 7: The Super League has not yet been shelved: the first attack was repulsed. But now it is clear: The top teams will find a billion-dollar sponsor overnight to set up their own business. The Super League didn’t die. At first it was just a means of enforcing your own interests in matters of Champions League reform. But at some point that will no longer be enough. (Bjönr Mahr and Maximilian Bülau)
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