El Mala's Empty Seat and the Run That Was Never Called

There is a moment at the RheinEnergieStadion that I still keep in my notebook, scribbled in pencil because I did not have time to open my laptop. The seventy-fourth minute, the score deadlocked, a young player took off his jacket and ran to the touchline. He came on, touched the ball for the first time on the left flank, turned with half a step, then vanished from the defender's sight. Fifteen minutes. That was all. Fifteen minutes for a name the whole of Germany was arguing over whether to call up.

Said El Mala, nineteen years old, a winger at 1. FC Köln. At that age people usually write about him with words like talent, rough gem, the future of German football. But football does not live on the future tense. It lives on Thursdays.

That Thursday, the German Football Association published the first squad list of the new head coach, Jurgen Klopp. A routine list in technical terms, but an event because it opened a new cycle. It included Assan Ouedraogo, twenty, of RB Leipzig. It did not include El Mala.

He has worn the Germany U21 shirt seven times and scored once. He has never played for the senior national team. Right after the list was published, Lothar Matthäus, once a captain and once an icon, criticised the decision to leave El Mala out. He called it a mistake that was not sporting.

The words not sporting weigh like a stone thrown into a still lake. They are not about expertise. They are about collective memory: that German football has grown used to seeing a boy on the wing and assuming he is the one who will save it.

At his club, Köln sit eleventh with four points after three rounds. They beat Hoffenheim 2-1, lost 1-4 to Stuttgart, drew 1-1 with Bremen. Next comes an away trip to Hamburger SV. A mid-table side, struggling, living on matches where the smallest error is enough to change the result.

And in that side, El Mala is a rocket kept in reserve.

Klopp has stated plainly what he wants. The playmakers of modern football, in his words, sit out wide rather than in the centre. A compact manifesto, and also an evolution that has been recognised rather than invented. Since his Liverpool years, his wide forwards have always been men who both dribble and burst into space, who both create and finish.

El Mala's profile matches that description. Pace. Dribbling. Directness. A winger who receives on the touchline, turns in half a beat, and turns the flank into a tunnel reserved for himself. In the eyes of a coach who loves transition, that is the prototype born to serve the idea.

But El Mala's real test does not lie in his attacking output. It lies in his pressing distance.

This is the most easily overlooked point, and the decisive one. In Klopp's system a winger may dribble a little less well, may pass a beat slower, but is absolutely forbidden to stand still when the team loses the ball. Counter-pressing is an entrance requirement, not a bonus. The commentary around El Mala's case concedes this outright: this is the decisive trial.

I sat for a long time in front of the tactics board hung beside the history map in my office, thinking about how unfair that criterion is. A whole childhood of practising dribbling, a whole youth of practising shooting, and the door to the national team is opened by a single question: will you run back?

El Mala's individual club data is almost blank. No expected goals, no expected assists, no pressing figures. That forces every assessment to stop at the descriptive level. It also reduces the comparison with Ouedraogo, the man picked instead of him, to one question: who runs more when the ball does not belong to him?

There is another detail more striking than any of this. At Köln, El Mala is being used as a substitute, a rocket kept for the final fifteen minutes. For a mid-table club that is sensible usage: save the legs, save the energy, release him when the opponent has tired.

But for a national team, that usage is a handicap. A player who plays only fifteen minutes a week cannot walk into an international fixture with the sharpness required. He needs rhythm, needs time, needs repeated duels so his body grows used to the intensity. The bench does not give him that.

On top of that comes the question of condition. El Mala missed the 1-4 defeat to Stuttgart through illness, and before that showed signs of a minor knock. Two weeks, two different reasons, one result: he was not on the pitch. For a young player searching for a foothold, that is a way of closing the door in his own face without ever realising it.

In the Stuttgart defeat Köln conceded four. A winger, of course, is not obliged to keep a clean sheet. But when you read the three results together, a narrow win, a heavy loss when the one unpredictable man was absent, a colourless draw, you see a team with a very narrow margin of safety. Everything depends on who is available.

Based on my experience of watching Bundesliga matches across many seasons, this is a familiar pattern for mid-table sides: they do not lose for lack of ideas, they lose for lack of people. And when a nineteen-year-old becomes that person, the weight on his shoulders is far heavier than his age warrants.

Behind those results lies a transfer story few care to look at directly. El Mala endured a turbulent summer. A move to Brentford, the English club, was reportedly rejected. Borussia Dortmund, a club a tier above Köln, showed interest. Then, unexpectedly, he signed a contract extension with Köln.

The transfer window does not sell players, it sells dreams packed carefully for shipping. An extension after failed moves is not an ending. It is a way of holding an asset in order to sell higher later.

Brentford represent Premier League money. Dortmund represent the upper tier of the Bundesliga. That Köln managed to keep El Mala says what they believe: this boy will appreciate. And what nobody says aloud: there is very likely a release clause in that extension, the standard tool that persuades a young player to sign while preserving an exit for himself.

Look up at the Bundesliga map and the distance becomes plain. Bayern, Leipzig and Leverkusen occupy the title tier. Dortmund, Frankfurt and Stuttgart occupy the European places. Köln sit in the middle. And directly above them is Dortmund itself, the club that came knocking. A player who matures at Köln and plays well will attract Dortmund. A player who plays well at Dortmund will attract the Premier League. That is the ladder, and no one on it is allowed to stand still.

This is where I want to linger, because it touches something I often think about while sitting in small cafés in Chengdu, watching German football at three in the morning.

There is a thing I call the memory of empty seats. Not the seats inside a stadium, but the seats inside a supporter's head, the place where a player should have sat, should have played, should have scored, but never appeared for a reason somebody forgot.

German football has lived with such gaps many times. What is worrying is how it handles them: with criticism, not with solutions.

The decision to leave El Mala out of the previous coach's World Cup squad was turned into a moral case. Matthäus said it was not sporting. But the label not sporting is applied very quickly, and very rarely entirely accurately. None of us knows exactly which training session, which metric, which conversation led to that decision.

Here the collective memory of German football makes a familiar error: it loves the talent more than the process. It wants a nineteen-year-old to walk onto the pitch and sing. It does not want to know what that boy did in the sixtieth minute when his team was a goal down and the ball was in his own half.

I once wrote about a night in Moscow, when Modric turned and the whole city stopped breathing to hear the waltz. Twenty thousand reads overnight. Back then I thought football was the story of heroes. Later, after a season in which the whole world played in silence, I understood something else: football is the story of those who are absent, and a hero is only what we call those lucky enough to be seen.

El Mala's absence is not a verdict. It is a test of the system.

If Klopp genuinely wants transition football, if he genuinely needs wingers who can dribble, then finding a way to bring El Mala in is the responsibility of the coaching staff, not of the boy. A nineteen-year-old cannot manufacture his own chances. All he can do is run.

There is an image I still carry from Doha, when Morocco built their sand fortress and reached the semi-finals of the 2026 World Cup. A nation that did not build its wall from stone but from belief. Five matches, one goal conceded. German football needs a belief like that too, but its belief is built from metrics and expectation, far more fragile when a nineteen-year-old does not run back fast enough.

And here is the paradox few care to name: Klopp is at the opening stage of his tenure, the phase when experiments are usually welcomed. A home debut against Greece is the perfect occasion. Yet precisely because the phase is delicate, he is also more likely to pick safer men, men already proven at a higher level, names that need no explanation.

A new coach always talks about the future. But in his first six months, he always picks the present.

I wonder what will remain after all this argument. It is quite possible El Mala will come on again in the seventy-fourth minute of the next match, turn with half a step, and vanish. It is quite possible he will be called up. It is quite possible he will not.

But one thing is more certain than any forecast. This boy is being valued by something that is not in his feet. Valued by what people think he might become. And when you are young inside such a system, every omission is a reminder that you have not yet convinced anyone.

Football does not remember the players who wait. It remembers only those who walk in.

What I hope, and what I will keep writing about in the weeks ahead, is that the machine answers the simplest question: if he is not good enough at pressing distance, say so and show him how to fix it. And if he is good enough, then do not let him learn how to wait. Because there is something more dangerous than being abandoned, and that is never being tried at all.