Germany trying to use Confederations Cup to learn about themselves

The Confederations Cup isn’t always the most scintillating competition in the world, as it’s essentially a glorified friendly tournament played out as a World Cup preview. But when Germany announced their squad for the 2017 Confederations Cup in Russia, a lot of eyebrows went up all the same.

Germany dropped every major player from the squad, taking what can only be called a B team to Russia, and many people aren’t quite sure what to make of it. But it’s quietly a brilliant move from Die Mannschaft, essentially saying that they don’t care about the results of a tournament that doesn’t matter on any significant scale, because they would rather see how their other players do against some of the world’s best talent.

It’s a bold move, with each of the seven other teams in the Confederations Cup announcing squads that are about as close to first choice as possible. But Germany’s young and relatively inexperienced team — their most-capped player and captain for the tournament is 23-year-old Julian Draxler, who has won a whopping 30 caps coming into the tournament — is a different beast and one who will be fascinating to watch over the next couple of weeks.

Make no mistake — despite being second choice, this German team is still very talented. They’re just inexperienced working as a unit at this level, mostly because the German national team is absolutely loaded to the gills with top-shelf players. But this team has youth and hunger in spades — their only two players over 27 are a pair of strikers in Sandro Wagner and Lars Stindl who are fighting for club jobs right now, and most of the squad has one point or another to prove.

The makeup of the squad is honestly quite interesting. It’s normally a squad dominated by Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund players, but instead there’s only a whopping total of four players combined from the two teams, and two of them — Niklas Süle and Sebastian Rudy — don’t even officially join Bayern until the day before the Confederations Cup final. Instead there are four players from Hoffenheim — including Süle and Rudy — three from Bayer Leverkusen, two from RB Leipzig, and even two from Paris Saint-Germain, including Draxler and backup goalkeeper Kevin Trapp.

And there’s a lot of fascinating talent in that group, too. Draxler looks like he’s on the cusp of a massive step forward in his quality level as a player, striker Timo Werner dropped a lot of jaws playing with Leipzig last season, and Leon Goretzka, Emre Can, and Julian Brandt are all trying to prove that they can hold their own as part of the senior national team squad. Throw some interesting defenders like Antonio Rüdiger, Shkodran Mustafi, and Matthias Ginter into the mix, and seeing how this squad shakes out and plays will be a lot of fun.

It’s a varied and interesting squad, and one that’s going to give Germany boss Joachim Löw a lot of important information as he considers his future squads between now and the actual World Cup next summer. The top end of the squad — anchored by the likes of Thomas Müller, Mario Götze, Toni Kroos, Mesut Özil, and Jérôme Boateng — is obvious. But the squad players who fill out the rest of that team and provide Löw with his vital substitution and rotation options have been in a state of flux ever since Germany won the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. That flux figured prominently in their failure to impress at Euro 2016, and Löw would eagerly love to fix that weakness.

With so much up in the air in that stretch of the roster, turning so completely to that group for this tournament will give Löw and his staff plenty of time and opportunity to evaluate those players against top-notch competition, as well as give them experience in the national team against that same competition. That should prove invaluable for a team that needs to learn more about itself right now — and giving their first-choice veterans most of a summer off to properly rest for the first time in years won’t hurt either.

Germany almost certainly won’t win the Confederations Cup. But with a favorable group matchup against Chile, Cameroon, and Australia, they should still be able to make the knockout rounds and get a great match in against Portugal or Mexico. And with the purpose of this tournament for Germany being to answer some questions about themselves, those games against Portugal, or Chile, or Mexico, and even against Cameroon will bear close scrutiny, because even with the lack of the pressure of expectation, these players will still be putting a lot of pressure on themselves to perform and impress in this tournament.

Some will shine, and some will break — and seeing which players do what will tell us a lot about the shape of the Germany national team in the years to come.