Germany used to win by being certain — Nagelsmann is betting on the opposite

When Germany’s Julian Nagelsmann read out his goalkeepers, he reached backward. Manuel Neuer is forty years old, a year removed from saying he was finished with the national team, and Nagelsmann named him anyway — first choice, no argument. To do it he left Marc-Andre ter Stegen, one of the best goalkeepers in the world, off the squad entirely. It is the single most revealing decision Germany have made before this tournament, and it has almost nothing to do with goalkeeping. It is a manager looking at the most thrilling young team he has ever built and deciding he needs one old certainty standing behind it.

That is the strange shape of this Germany. For most of living memory they were the most certain team in the sport: not the most beautiful, not always the most talented, but the one you could set your watch by. They knew what they were. They won by knowing it. And somewhere in the last decade that certainty came apart in their hands, and they have spent the years since trying to find out what they are now. This squad is the answer, or the closest thing to it, and the honest truth is that nobody, not the manager and not the players, is entirely sure it will hold.

The machine that stopped running

It is worth remembering how complete the old version was. This is a four-time world champion, a country that turned football into a system and then exported the system to everyone else. The last time they lifted the trophy they did it the German way — relentless, organised, a team in the truest sense, a group that knew its job to the inch. Then the floor gave way. Holders one summer, knocked out in the group the next. Four years later, the group again, sent home before the knockout rounds even began. On home soil at the European Championship they finally looked like themselves for a few weeks, and then ran into Spain in the quarter-final and went out in extra time, beaten by the better side. The machine had not just slowed. It had forgotten what it was for.

So Nagelsmann inherited a paradox: a football nation with a glorious instinct for control, and a generation of players who do their best work when nothing is controlled at all.

The new engine runs on chaos

Because the talent is real, and it is the most exciting Germany have had in years. Florian Wirtz is the organising intelligence of it — a forward who plays as if he can see two seconds into the future, who left for Liverpool last summer for a fee that made him one of the most expensive players in the world and spent the season proving the number was not madness. Beside him, when his body allows, is Jamal Musiala, the most purely gifted footballer Germany have produced this century, a player who carries the ball through crowds the way water finds a crack. Nagelsmann has been experimenting with a front line that adds the young Bayern attacker Lennart Karl to the two of them, and the idea behind it is not structure. It is the opposite of structure. Velocity, invention, three players swapping positions so quickly the opponent can never settle on who to mark.

This is a Germany built to improvise — and improvisation is the one thing German football was never famous for. Joshua Kimmich, the captain, has been moved to right-back, a leader playing on the edge of the team rather than its centre. Around him Antonio Rudiger and Nico Schlotterbeck and Jonathan Tah form a back line that is quick and aggressive rather than monolithic. Nagelsmann has said it himself, in not so many words: the backline and his two best attackers are settled, and almost everything else is still a conversation. Weeks from the opening match, the manager of a four-time world champion does not yet know his best eleven. That is not a crisis. It is, deliberately, the plan. He is keeping the team fluid on purpose, because fluid is what this group does well.

The fragility under the brilliance

The risk is written into the best player’s body. Musiala has spent most of the season recovering from a broken leg and a dislocated ankle, an injury severe enough that lesser managers would have left him at home and called it prudence. Nagelsmann refused. He has built a portion of his attacking idea around a player who is only now returning to full sharpness, and who carries the kind of injury that does not always come back all at once. If Musiala is right, Germany have a match-winner most teams cannot match. If he is half a yard short, the whole improvised front line loses the man it improvises around. It is a bet placed on a healing bone.

And that, finally, is why the goalkeeper makes sense. A team this fluid, this young, this dependent on everything going right in the final third, needs one place on the pitch where nothing is in question. Neuer is that place. He is not the player he was, nobody is at forty, but he is the last man left from the era when Germany knew exactly what they were, and Nagelsmann wants that certainty behind his chaos like a hand on a railing. The recall is not nostalgia. It is insurance. The manager is betting the future of the team on improvisation, and hedging it with the one piece of the past he could still call up.

The path, and the question at the end of it

The draw was kind, which buys time for all of this to settle. Germany open against Curacao, a debutant nation playing the biggest match in its history, then meet Ivory Coast, quick and physical and not at all overawed, and close the group against Ecuador, the most organised and dangerous of the three. A team of this depth should come through, though Germany of all teams know what the word “should” is worth at a World Cup. The group is not where they will be measured. They will be measured later, in the knockout matches where the opponent stops backing off and starts contesting every pass, where improvisation either becomes genius or unravels into a team that never quite decided what it was.

That is the real test of this side. The old Germany would have known how to win those games; it had a method for them, a certainty it could fall back on when the football got ugly. This Germany has thrown that method out and bet on something faster and far less safe — on talent, on velocity, on three young attackers reading each other better than anyone can read them. It is the most un-German team Germany have sent to a World Cup in a generation, and it is led by a man who recalled a forty-year-old to remind it where it came from. We are about to find out whether a team that has forgotten its old certainty can learn to win without it.