30 January 2012

Being the nation that has produced one of the most exciting group of young players to grace the international stage in recent years, Germany’s model for player development and education is now widely regarded as being one of football’s leading standard-bearers for other countries to attempt to emulate.

The emergence of these outstanding individuals under Joachim Löw has coincided with significant changes in the way the country’s domestic youth development has been structured, managed and monitored. 

Five years ago the Deutscher Fussball-Bund, in collaboration with the German league, introduced a new quality charter for each Academy at clubs in the top two divisions and at an additional ten amateur clubs to adhere to. This was devised to ensure that best practice in development, based upon over 200 different criteria relating to facilitating and nurturing talent, were followed at all levels all over the country.

As a result, once every three years each Academy is now awarded a certificate and rating based on the quality of its internal practices, highlighting the centres which merit special commendation for its work.

One of the club’s which currently possesses one of the highest ratings in the country is Hertha BSC Berlin. Under the Management of Academy Director Hans-Peter Jakob, the club currently boasts fourteen German Youth internationals aged between 15-20, who are all looking to emulate the club’s former scholars that have gone on to attain full honours at senior international level, which includes Jerome and Kevin-Prince Boateng.

As a way of maintaining a high level of certification, the Federation expects clubs to store as much information as possible on its players and the activities that they have undertaken throughout their time at the club. This is to ensure they have a log which demonstrates that they have met the standard criteria expected by all Academies throughout the season.

As a consequence, Hertha have been using Scout7 Training Ground for the past two years to manage all key information across several internal departments on a day-to-day basis. This has included all of their scouting and recruitment information, coaching and fitness sessions, post-match performance reports, sports science and medical data.

One of the key users of the application is the club’s scouting coordinator and in-house Scout7 Training Ground administrator Robert Deising, who oversees a large team of regional scouts entering data into the application, in addition to assisting users within each department to get up to speed with the functionality of their own specific modules.

When reflecting on the bigger picture, he believes that the most important feature of the application is that it allows all key data to be centralised into one single source, used across all areas of the Training Ground.

“Some applications only specialise in one area of performance” says Deising.

“For example they will only do Squad Management or Sports Science, which means everything is all decentralised. It is important to have everything linked, so all the information is available from one place.

“The long-term plan for us is for every department to be using Scout7 Training Ground to manage data. At present the modules which are being used extensively are the medical module, which records data ranging from simple allergies through to injuries and rehabilitation, together with the scouting module, which is very important for me in my co-ordination role.

“The club coaches are also using the system to log both match reports and their coaching sessions into our database.

“One of the key long-term benefits for us is having the opportunity to build a central archive of player information, because we have to document a lot of information to prove we are fulfilling all our obligations to the young players for their development and for our certification to the German Football Federation.

“We already know that we have good practices in place, but we need a good platform to file all the important information and to show the Federation exactly what we are doing.

“Scout7 Training Ground is a perfect platform for us to use, because it brings everything together - we live in a world now where people don’t work solely with paper correspondence, ideally everything should be filed online and shared where everyone can see it.”

A full in-depth feature on Hertha BSC Berlin’s use of Scout7 Training Ground can be found in the latest edition of Scout7’s newsletter Leading the Line, which will be circulated to Scout7’s mailing list in early February.

For more information on Scout7 Training Ground please contact us at info@scout7.com