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Champions League winner Lars Ricken looks a
proud man as he walks through Borussia Dortmund’s state-of-the-art youth
training centre.

Pitches, weight rooms and treatment facilities
abound in this complex, nestled in a leafy area of the Ruhr valley city and
dedicated to young players.

“When I was growing up I did not have access to
this,” said Ricken, one of the club greats who scored in the 1997 Champions
League final to help Borussia win the trophy. He is now the club’s youth
coordinator.

“You cannot compare this with 20 years ago,” he
told Reuters during a tour of the centre.

The academy, which includes a boarding house
for the most talented youth players, is one of 36 of its kind in Germany as all
Bundesliga and second Bundesliga clubs must have one.

They are largely responsible for producing
Germany’s dazzling and young World Cup team, who finished third in the
tournament in South Africa in July.

Nineteen of the country’s 23 World Cup players
were a product of the clubs’ youth academies and the squad’s average age was
less than 24 years and nine months.

Players such as Thomas Mueller, Mesut Ozil,
Sami Khedira, Jerome Boateng, Holger Badstuber and keeper Manuel Neuer, who are
now household names worth millions of euros, emerged from this system.

“The need to introduce a uniform obligatory
youth training system emerged after Germany’s disastrous 1998 World Cup and
Euro 2000,” Reinhard Rauball, president of the German soccer league (DFL),
which runs the top two divisions, said over a light lunch.

“We said we have to do something so that we
never have such results again.”

Licence
requirement

From July 2002 the youth academies became a
requirement for clubs wishing to obtain a licence for either of the top two
divisions.

Since then more than half a billion euros have
been poured into the system, 83 million euros last season alone.

The youth academies must follow strict
guidelines including having a specified number of floodlit pitches, teams with
a set number of players, qualified coaches and scouts. They must also have a
clearly defined philosophy.

“We play systems of 4-2-3-1 or 4-3-3,” said
Ricken. “Basic attacking football and always going forward.” It is no
coincidence that this is also Germany’s favoured system.

“It is a system that is very popular and can be
morphed into any other system,” Ricken said.

Since 2002 the academies have fed clubs with
hundreds of players. Three years ago 88 Bundesliga and 56 Bundesliga 2 players
came from the academies.

This season the figures have risen to 110 and
88 respectively, representing 20 percent of all first and second division
players or one in five players.

The programme has also been an overwhelming
success for the national teams.

Every Germany under-21 player last season was a
product of the academies, and 21 players out of the 24 in the U20 team.

Transfer
money

Borussia built their new academy in 2005 with
part of the money from the transfer of David Odonkor to Spain’s Betis.

“It may be expensive but it is the right way,”
said Rauball, who as president of Borussia Dortmund is proud of his team’s
current four starting players who have emerged from the academy. Only Bayern
Munich have a higher number with six.

“It is normal that some of them will leave,”
Rauball said in reference to the 2009 U21 European champions Khedira and Ozil
who joined Real Madrid after their World Cup performances.

“German clubs may lose some of their young
players to other leagues but it is the right way to go forward in the future,”
he added, quick to point out that Borussia’s 16-year-old striker Marvin Duksch,
already a Germany international with the U15, U16 and U17 teams, could be the
next big thing.

“The sport is at the heart of things for us and
nothing else,” said DFL CEO Christian Seifert.

“This licence system is one of the biggest
inventions that German soccer has made.

“We are not focusing on what other leagues are
doing. We define our own way.”

A number of foreign leagues including Major
League Soccer (MLS) in the United States, the South African league and several
from Eastern Europe had come to Germany to learn from the system, he said.

“We are working in an industry where the end of
the road is merely that the next season is coming. We have to have in mind the
long-term effects of the decisions we take today.

“We cannot think about just the next big deal.
We have to do everything we can to keep the wheel turning for next year and the
year after and so on.” This down-to-earth approach has paid off handsomely for
Germany, which boasts the biggest average attendance in Europe, with 42,000
fans per match.

It also has the cheapest average ticket price among the top
leagues, 20 euros, and not a single club near bankruptcy despite the biggest
economic downturn in decades which has hit other major leagues much harder.