[Skybird]

Like in German football, so in German politics, I say. And FOCUS writes:
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We experience the relative decline of a nation - not only in soccer

Germany has been eliminated from the World Cup. This defeat "feels like the end of something," wrote the Guardian. A sentence that shows that it is about much more than soccer.

Soccer is a game, but a game that reflects our soul. In the way we play, a society finds its expression. We look at Hansi Flick and dimly recognize Olaf Scholz's little brother. We look at the national team and look at ourselves.

On the pitch, our relationship of risk to safety, our attitude towards fairness and violence, but also our work ethic, the stock of courage and the capacity for creativity become visible.

In a sense, a visualization of our operating system takes place. Sociologist and soccer expert Norbert Seitz says, "There's a symbolic correspondence and atmospheric similarities between politics and soccer."

Which brings us to the humiliating defeat of the World Cup. The British newspaper The Guardian wrote: "Despite Flick's urgent talk of new beginnings, this feels like the end of something."

At this point, at the latest, it is not only the national coach and the players who should be paying attention. We, as citizens, are also participating observers of a long coming to an end that relates to our previous way of living, working and doing politics.

We are not bad, but the others are better.

We are witnessing the relative decline of a nation that - after the wartime rubble had been cleared away - was repeatedly hailed as the world champion of prosperity, growth and exports. This new Germany has struggled.

It has inspired. It found itself in reunification. We were often enough the tournament winner of globalization. The world as a summer fairy tale [reference to the football woprld cup 2006 in Germany, Skybird].

This self-confident but not arrogant country no longer exists. We have become strangers to ourselves, although - or precisely because - we have hardly changed at all. Germany is still playing with the operating system of the 20th century - and not just in soccer.

The team lacks "the dirty - we are a very, very dear team," said defensive player Antonio Rüdiger, who earns his money at Real Madrid. His diagnosis extends beyond soccer.

German statehood looks like a big DFB - flaccid and often downright impotent. It not only lacks the dirty, it also lacks the desire to innovate. Our public service is an analog system in which the paper rustles and the coffee machine rattles.

Our welfare state pays out more and more to people, even though on the payer side the supply chain is broken. The two large state-owned companies - Bundeswehr and Bahn AG - are dysfunctional: lazy and unimaginative, they get by.

This economy has not been able to win an economic tournament for a long time, even if the BioNTech founders were able to score a much-noticed surprise hit.

But Germany as a whole is no longer admired, but often ridiculed. The presenter and his round of talks on Qatari television covered their mouths in derision as the tournament drew to a close for the Germans. And goodbye!

No one wants to take responsibility for what Johannes B. Kerner called a "historic defeat" in the evening. The DFB functions like the party state; it is only in its ability to persevere that it is still at the top.

The similarities are systemic: In his former life, the football president was SPD state director in North Rhine-Westphalia and spokesman for the SPD party executive committee in Berlin.

Lessons have been learned: In parliaments as well as at the DFB's press conferences, people hand each other the prefabricated punched phrases. The government exalts itself, the opposition puts it down. And every few years there is a change of roles.

Only the playing system always remains the same. The DFB boss wants to "now look ahead" and "initiate an orderly procedure on how we deal with this situation."

Those who cannot deliver the core of their mission - in soccer, winning the tournament; in politics, creating prosperity - swerve into questions of attitude.

From now on, things get creamy. Instead of hard indicators, people now want to be morally superior. Suddenly, politics and soccer are no longer successful, but right. One flies out, but with attitude. The balance sheet used to be clean, now it's the conscience.

Value-based soccer means the politicization and thus defocusing of the players. Value-based economic policy is tantamount to a subscription to becoming poor.

Robert Habeck is getting out of coal and nuclear energy at home and is not getting into fracking, which is why we have to buy fracking gas from America and Arabia and nuclear power from France for a lot of money.

But be careful, comparing does not mean equating: Hansi Flick and his national team are clearly at a disadvantage here. If the national coach were allowed to buy extraterritorially like the minister, Flick would have ordered three additional goals on the spot markets in the Japan game.

If the DFB were allowed to buy its victories on credit, it would have long since set up a special fund to finance missing game ideas.

"I'm afraid of falling into a hole," Kimmich said after the premature exit. And that's exactly how many people feel today. The federal government's bought-in victories don't warm them. On top of the mountain of debt, the eternal ice age reigns.

Yet there are great players in the land of family businesses. They are called hidden champions because they have mastered their technology, because they know how to storm, stonewall and clear the field from behind in a compact formation in cooperation with suppliers and dealers.

But even the greatness of an economic nation does not result from the addition of its moves. Just as on the soccer field, a mental bracket is needed here, too, a game idea that connects the many I's into a we.

This guiding idea is missing from the DFB and the Chancellor's Office. Why do we score goals? Why do we increase the gross national product?
Indifference is dangerous for soccer and politics

Everything seems piecemeal; in everyday government and on the soccer field. The players suffocate in their rituals and please themselves in the staging of significance.

We see them, but we don't feel them. They speak, but not to us. When they have their say on the radio, the cab driver searches in routine indifference for the nearest music station.

This indifference is dangerous for soccer as well as for politics, because it leads to social torpor and bad humor. Before the ascent comes the belief in the ascent.

And after faith comes hard work. Or to put it in Jürgen Klopp's words: "Sometimes I have the impression that I'm the only one in this country who believes more in training than in transfers."

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