St. Pauli, a second-division football club based in Hamburg, has revealed it will be taking a different approach to youth football. It announced this week that it will no longer be working with player agents or private agencies in its youth system, preferring instead to cultivate direct relationships with individual players.

"We want to focus on partnership and dialogue with the players, their families and their relatives," explained the head of the club's youth academy, Benjamin Liedtke, as St. Pauli officially positioned themselves "against the commercialization of youth football."

"This is not a decision aimed against football agents in general," said Liedtke. "It's about putting the focus in youth football on the players and those closest to them, not on agencies and the market."

From explicit anti-racism and anti-fascism campaigns to anti-sexism initiatives, St. Pauli has long established a reputation for socially progressive attitudes, even in the cut-throat capitalist world of professional football.

The St. Pauli youth football 'Rebellution'

In August 2022, following a comprehensive internal review, the club launched a self-styled "Rebellution" of its academy system with the tagline: "Another youth football is possible."

"We've noticed an over-professionalization of youth football which is too heavily orientated towards adult football," said Liedtke at the time. He lamented that, in his opinion, there was too little focus on individual technical and tactical development.

"The individual motives of the player were no longer the main focus," he explained. "It was more about match plans and team tactics. Youth football is becoming increasingly eventified in imitation of professional adult football. This is a bad development and one that we would like to reverse."

There is support for St. Pauli's stance in sports science, too. "It's impossible to tell if a child will make it at 10 or 12 anyway," Professor Arne Güllich of the Technical University of Kaiserslautern told Spiegel, cautioning: "Too much specialized training can actually have serious disadvantages for children."

Youth football: 97% don't make it

St. Pauli's change of direction comes at a time when, across Europe, the market for private agencies signing up young footballers is expanding, but the chances of actually making it as a professional are slimmer than ever.

According to new figures obtained by the British newspaper The i this week, 97% of players in Premier League clubs' youth academies never play a single minute of top-flight football, while 70% are not even offered a professional contract.

Of the 4,109 players analyzed, all born between September 1995 and August 2000 and registered in top-tier English academies, only 10% have ever gone on to make more than 20 professional appearances in any of the top four divisions of English football.

Similarly in Germany, only one in 40 players in the under-19 Bundesliga are handed a professional contract, according to figures quoted by Spiegel.

And with the German Football Association (DFB)'s national teams delivering disappointing recent results across the age groups — from the senior men's team's consecutive World Cup group stage exits to the failure of the under-21s to qualify for the 2024 Olympics in Paris — German football is asking itself serious questions about its youth development.

Munich: private academies shaking up youth football

Increasingly, new academies and agencies backed by private capital are stepping into the perceived breach. This is particularly the case in Munich, where a public dispute has erupted between traditional youth football clubs and new private ventures such as the Bavarian Football Academy (BFA). The BFA's backers include Robert Wuttke, the founder of internet dating platform Parship, and former Stuttgart, Schalke, Hannover and Cologne sporting director Horst Heldt.

"We just want to give talent a platform, nothing more," Heldt told Spiegel, while Wuttke insists that it's not about making money. On the contrary, he claims that each player costs him around €100 ($105), saying: "It doesn't add up as a business model."

Local clubs, on the other hand, claim that their players and youth coaches are effectively being poached by academies which, in exchange for much higher membership fees, can offer better facilities and training from better-paid coaches and the unspoken promise of a professional career.

"In the past, we'd have scouts from professional clubs enquiring about the best three players in a particular year. Now, the 25th best player is being told he can make it, too," Michael Franke, chairman of Philipp Lahm's former Munich youth team, told Süddeutsche Zeitung.

"We can't turn back time, but I'd like it if a different model were established."

Up in Hamburg, by refusing to work with private agencies, St. Pauli may just have launched one.

Edited by Matt Pearson