Germany lost a World Cup knockout match on penalties. That sentence used to be impossible. Now it’s just another line in a stretch of tournament failures that looks increasingly familiar to anyone who has followed England’s national team for the last 60 years.
Paraguay sent them home in the Round of 16. It took 120 minutes of dull, cautious soccer and then a shootout where Germany missed three of its six spot kicks. The same Germany that hadn’t missed a single World Cup shootout penalty in 44 years. The same Germany that built a reputation on being cold-blooded from 12 yards while England crumbled. Now they are the ones who can’t handle the moment.
This wasn’t a fluke either. Germany has now failed to reach the quarterfinals in three straight World Cups. Two group stage exits and this. The aura is gone. The scar tissue is building. And the German media is doing what English media has done for decades: panicking, dissecting, and pointing fingers.
Bild called the performance disastrous and awful. Slow, boring, lethargic, they said. Die Zeit talked about a loss of imagination and a team that has forgotten its former glory. Suddeutsche Zeitung said this was more embarrassing than the Qatar disaster. Sound familiar? It should. Swap the flags and the newspapers and you’d think you were reading about England after any tournament between 1992 and 2018.
The irony is that England, now coached by a German in Thomas Tuchel, actually looked more composed than Germany did in the group stage. England didn’t dazzle but they didn’t collapse either. Germany scored seven in their opener and looked like the old monsters for one night. Then they went back to being ordinary.
One moment in extra time summed up the shift. Jonathan Tah had a goal ruled out for a marginal call. The Germans screamed injustice. And everyone else remembered Frank Lampard’s ghost goal against Germany in 2010 and quietly smiled. Karma is real and it wears a Paraguay jersey.
Now the real question: what do they do with Julian Nagelsmann? He’s 38 years old and already looks exhausted on the sideline. The players don’t seem to be enjoying themselves. Kai Havertz, Florian Wirtz, Jamal Musiala, Leroy Sane. That’s a lot of attacking talent to waste on a team that plays scared. The depth isn’t there either and the character has been questioned by outsiders for years.
Jurgen Klopp is sitting there in the stands apologizing for being a distraction and calling himself an idiot for undermining the current coach. But Klopp is also smart enough to know exactly what he’s doing. He wants the job and the public pressure is already building. Germany needs to learn to like its national team again. Klopp is the best chance they have to make that happen. Nagelsmann’s team just isn’t fun and that matters more than people want to admit.
Germany will go through the same introspection that England went through after every failure. They’ll commission reviews and have honest conversations. And somewhere in the middle of all that soul-searching they’ll realize that the worst insult is also the most accurate one. They have become England. The only consolation left is that they aren’t Italy. Yet.
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