Euro 2016: Germany v Italy – The masters of youth production against the masters of management

On finally winning Germany’s first World Cup in 24 years, Jogi Loew sat down in the Maracana’s press conference room in July 2014, to give the comments that would commemorate the occasion.

“We’ve been together now for 55 days,” the German head coach began, after his side had beaten Argentina 1-0. “We started this project 10 years ago, so this is the natural result of many years’ work... We’ve continued that work and our strength has been our constant progress.”

Said in a typically measured tone, it often sounded like Loew was speaking the technical language of an industrial process rather than reflecting on one of sport’s great emotional occasions, but it was arguably more fitting that way. The former, after all, was what that victory in Brazil really represented.

Germany had got to that point because they were wealthy enough and intelligent enough to effectively industrialise youth coaching. They created a critical mass of magnificently talented players, to the point this was the “natural result” of a process, as Loew put it.

That put them on a level above everyone else who qualified for the tournament other than maybe Spain, and it is a daunting challenge for any opposition that faces them. That just happens to be Italy next, however, and their own last-16 elimination of Spain shows they are better equipped for that challenge than anyone. That is because they remain the masters of the other side of the game: how to manage that talent at the top end.

That triumph over the defending champions was itself a triumph of coaching. That Spanish manager Vicente Del Bosque had a much better squad than Italy didn’t matter, because Antonio Conte just knew how to get much better results out of his own players. He himself is merely the best product of Italy’s own best academy system, the famed Coverciano coaching school.

That is what this Euro 2016 quarter-final in Bordeaux is all about, and what gives it a real symbolic weight beyond every other match-up and even the two countries’ storied football histories. It is not just a tie between the most talented squad in the competition and the most talented coach. It is a meeting between the football cultures that have perfected the processes for producing both.

Germany have mass industrialised youth production to the most impressive level, while Italy still offers an effective Renaissance master’s workshop for coaches.

If those descriptions sound rather obvious and almost stereotypical given the history of the two countries, you only have to look at the obvious effects on the pitch on Sunday.

Italy will have a team drilled in the most sophisticated tactical moves, with all of that infused by the intensity Conte himself will be showing in abundance on the sidelines. They will be facing one of the most fully talented teams the game has seen, one where almost every German player is a “universalist” technically adept at almost every aspect of the game.

Exquisitely controlling the play of the world champions will be a player who is almost a poster boy for their football industrial revolution. As detailed in Raphael Honigstein’s magnificent Das Reboot, Toni Kroos is from the little town of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. His talent may not have been discovered in time to produce the player we now see had it not been for the huge changes made to the German infrastructure. Thanks initially to the lobbying of Dietrich Weise, the DvB first introduced a huge scouting and development scheme with regional centres as well as lessons for 10,000 boys under 12, all at a cost of around €2.5m per year. The 36 Bundesliga clubs were then persuaded to restructure according to a proposed new academy system, investing well into the hundreds of millions.

The net result of that great project has been that there are no gaps for any potential talent to fall through, and very few gaps in any player’s game. That is how you see Jerome Boateng ping perfect long-range passes, and score goals of the technical quality he did against Slovakia.

Italy do not have that kind of ability, as Conte freely admits. He doesn’t admit it with any kind of defeatism, though. Instead, it has served as a rallying call to otherwise limited players like Eder and Graziano Pelle.

“There’s no point in hiding the fact that it’s not the rosiest period for Italy in terms of footballing talent. And so given the fact that we can’t fall back on a selection of good players, we need to be a team, so I have tried to wage a battle over the last two years to make people realise this. And I think we are a team.”

He is also the perfect man to guide that team, and the perfect product of Coverciano. For all the deep problems in Italian football right now, the country rightfully remains proud of that academy, a workshop that has been described as a “Harvard of coaching schools”. It is still seen as their premium export, a guarantee of quality they can take anywhere. It is telling that they are already in negotiations to sell some of this expertise to the super-wealthy Chinese league.

They need only point to pictures of Conte in any sales pitch, or print his endorsement of the thinking behind it.

“The word ‘coach’ has to encompass everything,” he once told Sky Italia. “You can’t just be good at tactics. You can’t just be good from a motivational point of view. You can’t just be good from a psychological point of view. You can’t just be good from a managerial point of view in your relationship with the club or the media. You’ve got to be good at everything. You’ve got to try and excel at everything. To do this you’ve got to study and, for me, since I became a coach it is continuous study.”

From his own studies of so much football theory and the intricate ins and outs of tactical movements amid the facility’s Oxford University-vintage halls, the former Juventus midfielder then wrote a thesis entitled ‘4-3-1-2 and the educational use of video’.

He has more than put his theories into practice, and also shown the kind of independent thinking and adaptability that any good education should foster in its students. Conte actually deviated from four at the back once he came across the brilliant Juventus defence, but still uses video analysis as a cornerstone of his coaching, to make things clearer, to help visualise exactly what he is thinking.

That is one reason why Italy’s movement has been too sophisticated for Belgium and Spain, as the squad perfectly understood the reason for Conte’s otherwise relentless drills.

“It’s difficult to explain just how good he is,” Pelle said in the mixed zone after the win over Spain. “He works very simply, he doesn't complicate things, he’s been a footballer himself so he knows how to explain parts of the game and he is realistic because he has been there as a player. Now again, it is also going on the field and try to reproduce what he has been working on with us during the week.”

The reality is Conte going to have to come up with something new and different to beat Germany, and the game could well be decided by the minutiae, those little tactical turns he can come up with to counter the excellent of Loew's team. Whatever happens on the pitch between these two teams, however, it’s worth remembering it all comes from honing two of the grandest football ideas.