Germany’s victory at this summer’s World Cup was no fluke. It was the result of a masterplan hatched ten years ago that has helped to revolutionise the national game – both on and off the field. Gavin Newsham reports.

At this summer’s World Cup in Brazil, the German national side proved beyond any doubt that it is the ultimate tournament team. Without any real standout star players — no Messi or Neymar — they have hit upon a perfect footballing formula, making them the most consistent side in international football and the number one-ranked team in the world.

And this is not down to chance. The current crop of players and the way they play are the end result of a plan that goes back a decade. In 2004, the German team suffered a rare early exit from a major tournament when they failed to win a single game and returned home from the European Championships in Portugal after the group stages. Amid much soul-searching and hand wringing, the German Football Association (DFB) allowed then coach Jürgen Klinsmann and his assistant Joachim Löw (the current coach) to build a new blueprint for German football. It was based on heavy investment in youth football and academies, as well as creating a new identity for the game in Germany that every player, coach and supporter could subscribe to. And the result, bang on schedule, was Germany’s fourth World Cup victory.

It’s an ethos that extends well beyond the boardroom. Today, the Bundesliga not only has the lowest ticket prices of any of Europe’s five major leagues but also the highest average attendance, with its games played at 92 per cent of stadium capacity, a figure which, again, is the highest rate in Europe. In the Bundesliga, the average price for the cheapest match tickets is just over £10. In the Premier League, fans pay upwards of £28. For a season ticket, meanwhile, it’s an average of £207 in Germany’s top-flight games compared with £468 in England.

Recently, Bayern Munich even announced a new season ticket for the forthcoming season costing just £104, which, on the face of it, is about what you might spend on a day out at an Arsenal game. Indeed, Arsenal’s cheapest season ticket at their Emirates Stadium comes in at just under £1,000 for the season ahead. When he announced the new ticket deal, the Bayern President and former German international Uli Hoeneß explained the rationale behind the cut-price deal.

“We do not think fans are like cows, who you milk. Football has got to be for everybody,” he said, adding, “That’s the biggest difference between us and England.”

Yet having significantly cheaper matchday tickets and an absence of foreign money in the league hasn’t, in any way, prevented the Bundlesliga from prospering. Far from it. According to the Bundesliga Report 2014, the Bundesliga clubs generated more than £1.73bn of revenue in the 2012/13 season. Seventeen of the 18 clubs in the top flight and 15 of the 18 in the second tier registered profits and the league itself recorded operating profits of £303m. According to football finance experts at Deloitte, in the corresponding period in the Premier League, the 20 clubs also achieved record revenues of £2.52bn, with 13 of the 20 clubs recording a profit but with the Premier League itself posting more modest operating profits of just £82m.

That difference in profits has much to do with the amount the clubs spend on wages. In the Bundesliga, the overall wages/revenue ratio for players was 39 per cent while in England the clubs spent more than 70 per cent of their revenue on players’ salaries. It’s not that the top players aren’t rewarded well in Germany, it’s just, as former Liverpool midfielder and German World Cup runner-up Dietmar Hamann explains, “The average players in the Premier League will always earn more than the average players in the Bundesliga. That’s why you get so many foreign players in the English game — and that can only be to the detriment of the national side.”

But the Germans don’t need so many foreign players. Over the last decade they have invested more than £570m in youth academies, a move that has seen the average age of Bundesliga players in that period fall from 27.1 years to just 25.2 years and given birth to a generation of players that, as the World Cup showed all too clearly, know each other’s games inside out.

“It’s our youth academies that continuously provide the talents that make the Bundesliga and the national team so exciting and attractive,” adds the DFL’s Christian Seifert. “Our clubs invest €100m (£80m) in these academies and are rewarded with a sustainable basis of excellent homegrown players.”

Crucially, these homegrown players have far more opportunity of playing in their national league than their counterparts in England, where just 37 per cent of players in the Premier League are eligible to play for the national side. In the top tier of the Bundesliga it’s 57 per cent. It’s another reason that Germany performs so consistently at international level, as Christian Seifert explains.

“As a League we must do the best we can to give them the chance to become really good players,” he says. “This is the original idea of our youth academies. The players trained there are physically and technically excellent and, more importantly, the coaches trust in them.”

For all its bluster, the brutal truth is that while the rewards on offer in the Premier League are undeniably attractive, the world’s best players rarely choose to ply their trade in England. The likes of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Franck Ribéry, Andrés Iniesta and Lionel Messi have never made the move to England, while the ones that have played here, such as Arjen Robben, Cristiano Ronaldo and Luis Suárez, have all taken the opportunity of heading back abroad once the Continent’s best clubs have come calling. Even the winner of the World Cup’s Golden Boot, Colombia’s James Rodriguez, chose Spain’s La Liga over the Premier League, describing English football as “too physical” before he moved to Real Madrid in August for £63m.

“The best players don’t play in the Premier League any more. Yes, there are some great players but the elite ones will always go abroad,” says Hamann. “It’s different in Germany. The fact that the clubs there are owned by the members means there’s a real desire to have homegrown players in the squads. And they will get a chance to play, unlike a lot of the younger English players in the Premier League.”