The ground floor of RB Leipzig’s training facility in Cottaweg is like many others across Europe. A receptionist answers a telephone that never stops ringing. On a vast television hanging from one wall, the rolling sports news repeats itself on a slow loop.
Push into the building and the emphasis changes.
Inside, small plasma screens play highlights from recent youth-team games and describe the progress of talent far down in the academy. On the day The Athletic visits, a midfielder from the under-11s side is being celebrated under bullet points that note his “increasing goal threat” and “general improvement in attacking areas”.
It’s aspirational, of course. Senior and youth players at Leipzig train in the same place, so by the end of that day, Xavi Simons, Benjamin Sesko and the rest will all have heard the young midfielder’s name for the first time and seen his face. But, like the building itself, it describes an emphasis on the future.
The facility is home to 50 youth players at any one time. They live on the upper floors, have their own living rooms and kitchen facilities, and are cared for by a host family, who also live on site.
And there is everything that a young player could need. The gyms are state of the art. There is a mini stadium outside, among training pitches, an obstacle course, a sprinting hill and even a padel court. Older academy players have their every action in training monitored by a network of cameras covering every blade of grass. There is even an app through which coaches are able to send clips, feeding back on recent performances in sessions and in matches.
So it’s very much a place where careers can and should grow. And yet Leipzig are still to create many of their own players. They may have a reputation for advancing careers, but — currently — Stuttgart forward Ermedin Demirovic is the highest-profile Bundesliga player to have spent time in Leipzig’s academy, and there is no trace yet of a homegrown star.
Manuel Baum, 45, is charged with changing that. He was appointed head of youth development in 2023, having previously coached Augsburg and Schalke, and has been in charge of Germany’s Under-20s and Under-18s.
“All the experiences I’ve had in my football life, I want to try to bring to RB Leipzig,” he says. “In this part of Germany, they say there’s not enough talent. But that’s not true. It’s the education, it’s the system — but it’s not the players.”
Baum during his stint as head coach of Schalke in 2020 (Lars Baron/Getty Images)
In Leipzig, there are some unique challenges.
The club has only existed since 2009 and while the facilities are impressive today, as recently as 2015 — the season before the senior side won promotion to the Bundesliga for the first time — players at the training ground were changing in portable cabins.
However, there are other difficulties that must be overcome. Baum, standing in front of a projector screen displaying the geographical location of Germany’s Bundesliga clubs, and fallen powerhouses Hamburg, Schalke, Kaiserslautern and Nuremberg, explains.
“We’re here in Saxony,” he says, pointing to Leipzig’s location, islanded within what used to be East Germany (GDR). “There are more clubs in the south, the south west, the west and the north. But here round Leipzig, there’s very little — it’s about two hours to Berlin from here and to Wolfsburg.
“So, we have an exclusive situation. On the other hand, we have the problem that we have few other strong academies in the area. It means that the education of players when they arrive with us can be really low, because their coaching has not been as good previously.”
That deficit combines with other inconveniences. In 2025, unemployment in west Germany is two per cent lower than in the east. Among the country’s 16 states, the five poorest by average wage (including Saxony) are all in the east. Whether by making it harder for parents to ferry children to games or because it makes boots and equipment less affordable in relative terms, the disadvantage is clear — and born out in statistics.
Of the 150 German-born players who have played in the Bundesliga this season, not including Berlin, only seven were born in the east.
Leipzig’s partial answer to the problem has been their Forderoffensive (funding offensive) programme, which launched in March 2024 and supports clubs around the city, subsidising equipment and the employment of full-time coaches, as well as providing access to training courses.
“We have more than 600,000 inhabitants in this region,” says Baum, “and so it must be possible to develop a lot of players out of this area. And that’s why we’re going into the schools and kindergartens and spending a lot of money on this age group, too.”
RB Leipzig’s training facility (Seb Stafford-Bloor/The Athletic)
Baum can talk about football for hours and in deep, dense detail. He has strong beliefs about where player development is currently going wrong — or how misdirected some of the concerns around it are.
“Everyone is talking about the transition area: that’s between the under-19s and the first team. But in my opinion, the biggest problem is not the transition area but the foundation phase. We start to educate players too late, and we educate them more about where they need to run instead of what they do with the ball.
“That’s one of the reasons why we invest so many resources in the foundation phase here, because it’s really important that we give those players value.”
Part of that thrust involves improving conditions outside the club and the facilities with which players first come into contact. It also, he says, involves examining the coaching hierarchies that exist inside his own club.
“I need experts. Normally, at some clubs, if you’re the under-16s coach, you earn double what the under-10s coach earns. So, what does the under-10s coach then want? He wants to be the next under-16s coach so that he can earn more. This is not good for developing players, so these are some of the things we are working on.”
While not attributable to recent philosophy, there are early signs of the academy becoming more efficient. In November 2024, 17-year-old Leipzig-born midfielder Viggo Gebel made his Champions League debut against Inter. Gebel has also appeared in the Bundesliga this season, alongside Faik Sakar, who was 16 when he came on as a substitute against Holstein Kiel in December 2024.
Three of the 10 youngest players in Bundesliga history actually made their first appearances for Leipzig. That includes Gebel and Sakar, but also Sidney Raebiger, another academy product, who has since left the club and is currently playing for Eintracht Braunschweig.
Gebel (right) in action against Celtic in a UEFA Youth League game in November (Ian MacNicol/Getty Images)
These are successes and they will help to signpost the academy as a destination for other young players, but the target for Baum is to create a steady, reliable supply of players for the top level of the sport. In pursuit of that aim, he has overseen a battery of changes not just to how the club trains young players, but how it thinks about them, too.
“My first step was to create a mission: what is our goal in the academy?” he says. “We want to develop professional footballers in a high-performance culture. That means not only for our first team. It is also a success for us when we have players in other German first-league clubs.
“My second step was to align every department we had in the academy to this mission.
“When I started and evaluated the academy for the first time, those departments had their own mission — for example, the physiotherapists were more hospital physiotherapists than football physiotherapists. The athletic guys wanted to build the biggest muscles, but not necessarily those that were football related.
“Also, the head coaches: everyone had their own playing philosophy and they looked at their teams, and not at the individual players.”
Like most clubs, Leipzig harmonise the playing style and formations among their age groups. But now, training is also periodised from above. The teams between under-16 and under-19 level all have the same schedule, broken into blocks which dictate when they do team, individual or physical work, and at what intensity, with coaches then able to employ their methods within that framework.
Below under-16 level, where players do not train every day, the schedule is condensed.
It’s the key to “systematic player development”, Baum says, and it depends on “four key questions” that he asks all his coaches to consider.
“When and how much do you train? That’s the periodisation. What are you training? That’s the content — shooting, passing and so on. How are you training? That’s more the method — repetition, for example, or the methodology. And who is doing the training? Is it the head coach, the assistant coach, the athletic coach or the video coach… and so on.
“How are you using those resources for a training session?”
A screen in the training centre shows an under-15s game (Seb Stafford-Bloor/The Athletic)
In conversation with Baum, the real theme that emerges is individuality. One of the greatest challenges, he says, is to move coaches away from their loyalty to team performances, and more towards development. Winning games and tournaments is nice, he says, but unimportant in relation to the key aim: readying players for professional football.
“It’s rational to say that youth football is actually an individual sport,” he says. “For me, the only use of the team is that it provides an environment where the players learn how to play within a team.
“Teams don’t learn; individuals within teams learn. Teams don’t make debuts, individuals do. I’ve never seen a whole team move to the first team. It’s only ever a few players.”
There are other mechanisms they use. Training loans, where young players spend part of their weeks with regional clubs in the fourth or fifth tier, help expedite their readiness for the adult game. The Player Focus Program, as it’s known internally, is overseen by Cameron Campbell, a Scottish coach who arrived in 2024 having previously worked at Rangers, Aberdeen and the Right to Dream academy.
On Mondays and Tuesdays, players under the age of 16 are not necessarily grouped by age, but by the circumstances which best suit their growth; more commonly, it is referred to as bio-banding. Leipzig use it to examine and challenge their prospects under different conditions.
Really exciting times @RBLeipzig as we launch the ‘Fokusspielerprogramm’ to help our academy talent transition into the 1st Team by creating the most competitive, challenging & caring individual development programme.
— Cameron Campbell (@c_campbell18) July 31, 2024
“We have three different game types,” Baum explains. “A safe game, a stretch game and a stress game. If a player only has safe games, then he won’t develop because he’s always the best in his age group. But we have to put him under stress, because we want to see where he’s not good.
“Our experience is that the first time he normally gets really stressed is when he moves to the first team, but by then it’s too late.”
Allowing an older player to drop down can decrease the stress on their game. Conversely, putting a player in an older age group — and at a physical disadvantage — can simulate a few of the difficulties a player experiences when moving from youth football to the first team.
“So, we don’t just want to give players something to learn,” adds Baum. “We want to see what the player’s intuition is and then bring that to life.
“We try to give players freedom. In the past, RB taught the players a playing style. Now, we’re trying to teach them to understand football and to learn that playing style. If they move to (head coach) Marco Rose’s first team and he wants to do something different tactically, and the players we are producing only know how to work within one situation, then they have no chance.
“And you have to be agile in a game. If you get a goal after five minutes, everything changes. You have to understand football.”
Like many clubs, Leipzig do not assign a player a full-time position until they turn 16. That helps to broaden a player’s experience, he says. “If someone has always been a centre-back, then how do they know what it’s like to play against pressure from behind?”
There is recognition, too, that football is always changing and that the game Baum and his coaches are preparing these players for is constantly evolving.
“What does the future football game look like? A lot of clubs have become really good at technical development, but something we figured out is the importance of one-on-ones and how they can be a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) for us.”
Leipzig’s Sakar (left) playing for Germany youth in 2023 (Jasmin Walter/Getty Images for DFB)
Much of Leipzig’s investment at academy level has been targeted at data capture and the use of AI. Used efficiently, it can help to judge how effective players are in opposition to one another — with and against possession, but also off-the-ball. Is an attacking player ‘beating’ his marker with a run into space? Does a midfield consistently block passing angles and options?
Given Baum’s commitment to judging his coaches on how their players develop rather than whether their teams win, it’s a valuable metric to judge progress. Beyond that, emphasising the individual battles that will always be at football’s heart is a future-proofed way of preparing players for life in a fluid sport.
The trouble with investing at such an early stage of the process, of course, is that the benefits will not be seen until far into the future. Baum cheerfully accepts that he may no longer be at the club when that happens and that, in any case, judging the effect of these reforms will always be difficult.
“But I want to make it more accountable,” he adds, “so perhaps every year we should be getting 500 Bundesliga minutes from the academy, or we should be creating six new national team players.
“We have to have clear goals and a clear action plan.”
(Top photos: Seb Sebastian-Bloor/The Athletic; Getty Images)
