Bundesliga's unique take on the progression of Youth - Why it's not successful in Europe's biggest competition

Inability to maintain best players leads to stagnation and decline:

Timo Hildebrand

While the Bundesliga has seen a huge rise of interest from the foreign audience, it still clearly lacks the respect it deserves. Still seen as inferior to the other three major leagues, the Bundesliga’s overall quality is always scrutinized when players from within the league are assessed.

Generally also, we are recently witnessing the trend of the Bundesliga becoming a stepping stone for many aspiring youngsters, who wish to shine their lights alongside the biggest names in World Football. Invariably, that only comes from playing in some of the bigger teams in either the Premier League, La Liga or Seria A.

It has become a rarity to see a major name in World Football decide to move onto a Bundesliga club, besides Bayern Munich, who themselves are finding it more and more difficult to attract some of the world’s best players arguably because of the players reluctance to move to the Bundesliga, its a stain on the league rather than the club.

Alex Hleb, Dimitar Berbatov, Timo Hildebrand, Khalid Bouhlarouz, Tomas Rosicky, Diego Ribas, Rafael Van Der Vaart, Nuri Sahin and Arturo Vidal are just some of the players who were stars of the Bundesliga only to see themselves force their clubs hand and sell them to clubs in one of the other three top tier leagues.

What’s important to see that these players were not playing amidst a team struggling with mid-table mediocrity but rather saw themselves as title candidates (it would’ve been foolish to think otherwise considering that we’ve seen five different Bundesliga champions in the last eight years).

Timo Hildebrand left Stuttgart for Valencia, a side who finished fourth in the La Liga, the same year Hildebrand lifted the German club and came runners up in the DFB Pokal; a clear sign of the divide between the two leagues prestige. Though it is important to notice that, even though Hildebrand is German, many German national players rejected the call of from foreign leagues during the mid 2000′s which saw majority of the aforementioned players leave.

Per Mertesacker, Mike Hanke, Torsten Frings, Miroslav Klose, Lukas Podolski and Bastian Schweinsteiger were well demanded outside of Germany but choose to reject those temptations even so that some of them have now eventually moved away. That trend though is now looking weaker with the recent exits of Mesut Ozil, Per Mertesacker and Sami Khedira while Lukas Podolski is also almost certain to leave soon.

Here is a table showing how many Champions League qualifying Bundesliga clubs have done following their successful season:

The table shows in the second column the teams league position during the season in which they secured their place in the Champions League and then is followed by their performance in the Champions League the following season, their league position and any high profile transfers or exits that occurred during the summer transfer window.

In analysis of the 21 squads who qualified for the Champions League during the past seven seasons, there are eight clear examples of squads who under performed either in the Champions League or domestic league (both most likely) the following year and we can see that there is at least one transfer involving a superstar exiting and being replaced by a younger player (It should be noted that of the 21 squads that qualified for the Champions League, Bayern Munich squads accounted for 6 of them).