![Jens Lehmann](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/football/2024/06/07/TELEMMGLPICT000379040735_17177525838360_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq4KdjWabbidXRBu7jUVums_4Xpit_DMGvdp2n7FDd82k.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Jens Lehmann interview: Germany will not go further than Euro 2024 semi-finals
Exclusive: Lehmann discusses Germany’s Euros hopes, his rivalry with Oliver Kahn and if Mikel Arteta is right man for Arsenal
![Jens Lehmann](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/football/2024/06/07/TELEMMGLPICT000379040735_17177525838360_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq4KdjWabbidXRBu7jUVums_4Xpit_DMGvdp2n7FDd82k.jpeg?imwidth=680)
There are few Germany internationals, even given the success of that country’s national team, who know the pressure of playing in a home tournament as well as Jens Lehmann – the goalkeeper who 18 years ago encouraged his team-mates to change.
In the lounge of a smart Munich hotel we are recalling the 2006 meeting of the German national team in Berlin before the first World Cup in a unified Germany. Lehmann, then Arsenal No 1 and one of the Premier League’s more forceful characters, spoke up at a gathering attended by coach Jürgen Klinsmann and his staff but led by the players. Lehmann explained to them that they should play with a high defensive line and, with the help of Robert Huth, who was doing something similar at Chelsea, prevailed.
Lehmann was part of an Arsenal team that had reached the Champions League final that season with a similar approach. The final had ended badly for Lehmann – a red card on 18 minutes. But in the 12 games that preceded it, Arsenal had conceded just twice, and not once in the knockout stages. Kolo Touré and Sol Campbell at the heart of a defence that pushed high and relied on Toure’s pace, and that of full-backs Ashley Cole and Emmanuel Eboue, to recover if needed. As for Lehmann – he was running the show.
“It is about organisation,” he says. “When you do not concede goals it is never about a goalkeeper who can jump higher than the others – because I couldn’t – or the defender being twice as fast as the striker. It is about organisation and that was something we developed through the three years we did not get to the final. Without Arsenal I wouldn’t have played for Germany. I was a master in organising. Really seeing things, positions, stuff like that. My style fitted well into that team because we played high up.”
![Jens Lehmann celebrates with his Arsenal team-mates](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/football/2024/06/07/TELEMMGLPICT000003965012_17177527039190_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqGw_8_YqFn6oOhW46YSWnxGtqk8hw2rlPwBR-lPNGjw.jpeg?imwidth=350)
He says he gave an interview in Germany in 2004, after Arsenal’s unbeaten league season, in which he said that Arsenal played a high line. He said he was ridiculed for the idea at the time. “Hoch spiele? People asked, ‘What does it mean?’” he says. “It’s playing high. Three years later everyone who was an expert in football used that phrase. I did not invent it but I learned how to add to it. Kolo could play on the halfway line because every long ball [in behind], I was there. Jürgen wanted to play the same style. High up and short distances to the opposition goal. Little defending. That was his style and he set the parameters.”
Germany would go on to reach the semi-finals of 2006 having started with relatively low expectations. Lehmann, then 36, had been selected ahead of Bayern Munich’s legendary Oliver Kahn after an 18-month saga over who would be Germany’s World Cup goalkeeper that turned into a media obsession. Two years later Lehmann was in the team that reached the final of Euro 2008. That and much more is chronicled in Lehmann’s 2017 autobiography “The Madness is on the Pitch”, a gloriously plain-speaking look at his life in football which is unsparing about many in the game. Seven years on and Lehmann still has many strong opinions.
![Jens Lehmann and Germany celebrate victory over Turkey in their Euro 2008 semi-final](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/football/2024/06/07/TELEMMGLPICT000002459336_17177528441170_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqtCrirl5RWlZ67OmP8jqTpreHsZFrEmHQDi0eQN40zhg.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Now 54, he has a low regard for German coaches who do not have a playing background. He wonders if Germany’s new-found optimism about this summer’s home Euros may be misplaced. He questions whether Mikel Arteta is the man to take Arsenal to the Premier League title. He asks with some despair why the norm in describing football systems – 4-3-3; 4-2-3-1; 4-4-2 – omits the role of the man who is just as important as any other: the goalkeeper.
He has also trademarked “The Invincibles” in Britain and the European Union, the moniker for the Arsenal team unbeaten in the league season of 2003-2004. He has noted its use again this season with Bayer Leverkusen – although “The Invincibles” cannot be used for branding purposes without Lehmann’s permission.
“You can see there is huge potential,” Lehmann says. “People want to do things with us [the players] whether it is a game, documentary, venue, whatever. Unfortunately, Arsenal didn’t win it this season [and] as a big club every now and again you have to win … you can’t always be second, third or fourth. We [the 2003-2004 side] are still the last Arsenal champions which is a little bit of a pity. It’s too long.”
His immediate reservations are around Germany’s chances at the home Euros this summer. In 2006, he says the country was struggling with a limited pool of talent in the Bundesliga and only him and Huth playing outside Germany. Then came the great generation that won the 2014 World Cup, and now Lehmann sees problems again.
“In Germany, the youth-team coaches wanted to win to get up the career ladder – they needed results,” he says. He watched closely as his stepson, Lasse, the oldest of his three children, moved through the academy system. “Out of possession the coaches were shouting. As soon as they won the ball? Silence or ‘Play safe’. I was always saying dribble. But the coach didn’t like it because sometimes he lost the ball. That’s the nature of dribbling.
“German football peaked in 2014 and then the wrong coaching came into effect. We have in the three highest-profile positions in German football [last season, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, and the national team] coaches who never played themselves but were apparently good youth coaches. When you look at the players who came out of their teams – zero. There is no great German player who practised under them when they were youth coaches.”
He names Norbert Elgert, a youth coach at Schalke, the club at which Lehmann began, as a producer of talented players, as well as Hermann Gerland at Bayern. Otherwise Lehmann is sceptical. “Apart from that, very few coaches stuck out,” he says. “They probably get great results but they did not create many great players”.
He is also doubtful about what recent victories for Julian Nagelsmann’s national team might mean for Germany, who begin their home Euros against Scotland in Munich on June 14. “Difficult to say [how they might fare] because they had terrible results. They rescued themselves with a win against France and the Netherlands [in March] but we should not overestimate those results.
“For France and for the Dutch players it was before the Champions League [quarter-finals]. For us these games became highly pressurised because of the bad results before. All of a sudden, people are a little bit blindsided but there isn’t a lot that has changed. We played a different formation and got Toni Kroos back. But Kroos was in the last four tournaments and we got knocked out.
“I am not a believer in saying, ‘Now we are going to be great’. I can imagine that if we have three or four players with great talent they make the difference. I think as a maximum, a semi-final. After two years, they still don’t really know how to defend, but the good thing is that you only have to be a little bit better than the opposition.”
Lehmann has seen first-hand the good and the bad of Germany at tournaments. The relative success of 2006 and 2008 was prefaced by failure at the 1998 World Cup, and Euro 2000. Lehmann says that only by 2002, when the influence of foreign players in the Bundesliga forced Germany to modernise, did things improve.
“The [West] Germans always had 60 million people and then after 1990 we had 80 million. Out of 80 million you find enough talent to make a great team and we always had great players. But other nations produced great players and had a system and organisation. We always lacked that … our perception of tactics was, ‘Come on we have great players’.”
An assistant to Arsene Wenger in the latter’s last season at Arsenal, the club at which he played for five years, Lehmann is dubious about much of what he hears from modern managers. He rates Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola but is less impressed by others.
“When you are a theoretical coach and you have never played you think you need to manage the game. That’s what a lot of coaches make the audience believe. ‘Yeah we had a game plan, then we made tactical changes and so on’. I can see it is not true. I see they are talking about something which did not actually happen on the pitch, and had nothing to do with the outcome.
“Arteta has done really well bringing Arsenal up but if he is the right man for Arsenal now … I am not sure. Because you need to prove it. We could have won [the league] twice. Last year they were leading and in one month [April] they lost it [three draws and one defeat]. The culmination was when [Bukayo] Saka missed the penalty against West Ham at 2-0 up and it was a draw. It was two points.
![Bukayo Saka holds his head in his hands after missing a penalty against West Ham](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/football/2024/06/07/TELEMMGLPICT000332337328_17177533297830_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqxx-aMjhNEyvNcPOg7e3c1KS-UyG44at75VysheuSlvg.jpeg?imwidth=350)
“What people who hire coaches sometimes don’t understand is that the personality of the coach is super important as well. Look at the personality of the coach. Is he a winner or is he a nice guy who brings you to a certain level and then it is over?”
Lehmann is considering a career in management. He feels he knows what it takes to win having had to fight his way up from the cinder pitches of his childhood to make his Schalke debut as a teenager. He knows that along the way he attracted a reputation for being difficult and he does not deny that he was – because that was the price of surviving as a professional in his younger years.
“Inside a football team people thought the same [about me] but after a while they changed their minds, they thought, ‘Okay, he is difficult but he helps me to win’,” Lehmann says. “The difference between winning and losing is that losing is very easy. You don’t need to do a lot to lose. You don’t have to practice a lot. You don’t need to argue with your team-mates. You don’t need to argue with the coach. You don’t need to command a lot, to challenge a lot. When you lose it’s nice and it’s no effort. Everyone can lose. You do nothing – you lose. But you are a nice loser.
“You want to win? It’s the opposite. You have to do a lot. You have to talk a lot, you have to argue a lot, you have to discuss, you have to dispute a lot. That takes time and energy but it is worth it and along the way it creates friction.”
It was that drive which propelled him to become Germany’s No 1 relatively late in his career. The way in which he and Kahn were pitted against each other pre-2006, often standing yards apart in stadium mixed zones making their case to journalists like politicians, was, he writes in his autobiography, “a grotesque drama”.
![Jens Lehmann and Oliver Kahn training with Germany in 2006](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/football/2024/06/07/TELEMMGLPICT000004076464_17177524056840_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqXfJMPfENEq5oPh9E8lUEldHhMh81Y8GqX3ipA8YMo0k.jpeg?imwidth=350)
“It turned out to be the last really entertaining personal side-story of football,” he says. “But it was annoying for us and for our team-mates. If there had been Netflix or Amazon at the time they would have loved that story like Formula One [Drive to Survive]. For the last year and a half before the World Cup it was an ongoing daily thing. ‘He said that, he said this, he did that, now this happened’. There were arguments between us.
“For example, [in 2004] I was talking once about our relationship and I made a mistake. I said, ‘Yeah, of course we are talking but now we don’t talk that much because he has got a new 23-year-old girlfriend and I have my family so there are not that many things to talk about’. The media took this and smashed me into pieces. They said I was making a moral case. I’m sorry it wasn’t meant like that. He [Kahn] wanted to use it to get rid of me from the team.”
Remarkably, the two men were persuaded by then manager Rudi Voller to hold a joint press conference to try to calm the situation. Lehmann hung on to claim the No 1 shirt for himself and was the hero of the penalty shootout against Argentina in the 2006 World Cup quarter-final in Berlin.
![Jens Lehmann saves Esteban Cambiasso's penalty](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/football/2024/06/07/TELEMMGLPICT000003485399_17177522969560_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq-IWLY18X4-CzgyIcjLEAj1Gtmp-S2mpFD-59S3IygKU.jpeg?imwidth=350)
His ability as a goalkeeper comfortable playing a high line – a taste of football’s future – helped propel him ahead of Kahn. It is a topic on which he is naturally passionate. “The big weakness of nearly every top manager is that first of all they do not really understand the position and what a goalkeeper can bring apart from saves and playing with the ball at his feet,” he says. “It’s less playing football because everyone expects that now his goalkeeper passes the ball properly. You need to understand the relationship between probability and risk. What is my probability of being exposed if I play a certain style?”
No better exemplified, he says, than the way football operates to express its playing systems, “4-4-2, 4-3-3, 4-5-1, 3-5-2, whatever”. “If you tell a guy you are playing 5-4-2,” Lehmann says, “He will say, ‘Ah, that’s one too many’. No, it’s because someone who did not understand the game has invented 4-4-2. A clever man would say, ‘They are playing 4-4-3 because that reflects how they want their goalkeeper to be part of the game’. It would help some people to understand better what goalkeepers should actually do.”