On Wednesday, Focus magazine's sports editor Dirk Adam asked his Twitter followers whether the €80 million Bayern Munich had splashed out for the transfer of French defender Lucas Hernandez from Atletico Madrid wouldn't have been better spent on 320 Ferraris, 80,000 iPhones or 53 million scoops of ice cream. Adam forgot to include the best possible answer, however: the ideal thing the German champions could have done with €80 million would have been to buy another 10 Serge Gnabrys.

Yes,...

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Fifteen years at the highest level gives a national team coach plenty of sporting capital. Enough, for example, to survive both a humiliating first-round exit at a World Cup and relegation from the inaugural Nations League. It also gave Joachim Low licence to make bold moves, and he certainly did that when Germany traveled to take on the Dutch in the pick of the weekend's Euro 2020 qualifiers.

Having...

You didn't think that merely Germany's worst ever World Cup campaign, relegation in the Nations League, a racism crisis and what seemed like the hasty dropping of three national-team pillars would see off Jogi Low, did you?

Had Germany suffered a hefty beating at the hands of the Netherlands on Sunday evening, the prospect of Low's 13-year reign coming to an end was very real. The world would feel like a very odd place without him in charge of Die Mannschaft: he's part of the international football...

The Netherlands host Germany in the stand-out tie of this week's Euro 2020 qualifiers on Sunday (3:45 p.m. ET, ESPN+) and for the visitors' manager,  Joachim Low, there is so much more than the three points at stake in Amsterdam. The 59-year-old has to pull off no less than the most difficult -- some say impossible -- balancing act in international football right now: Low needs to convince an increasingly doubtful public back home that meaningful change and successful reinvention is possible...

It is officially international break time, and contrary to the old and tired criticism that international breaks are boring, March's FIFA window offers up some major storylines and heavyweight matchups.

With Euro 2020 qualifying beginning this week and key late-round qualifying games in both CAF and CONCACAF, Nick Ames spans the globe to tell us what to watch for in this jam-packed international break ...

Will the Dutch add to Germany's misery?

Last year, in the Nations League, Netherlands...

And just like that, they were gone. The international careers of World Cup winners Mats Hummels, Jerome Boateng and Thomas Muller came to an end on Tuesday, when Germany manager Joachim Low personally told the trio that their services were no longer required.

Axing the very players that his coaching staff had resolutely defended against all critics only five months earlier, calling them the team's "important axis" was a hugely surprising statement of intent by Low, both in terms of timing and rationale.

So...