Arsene Wenger has often dismissed international football as outdated and nostalgic hogwash. When asked about Fifa president Sepp Blatter’s initiative to support the inclusion of more native players in league football recently, the Arsenal manager didn’t mince his words. “Blatter’s trying to protect the World Cup, I’m trying to protect the quality of the game – they’re not the same thing,” said Wenger.

Selecting players on the basis of their nationality, is, in other words, not conducive to creativity and progress. While club coaches can mould and shape teams in their image, national team coaches must do with a relatively small pool of players. Patriotic fervour must often compensate for a lack of quality, reasons Wenger, who is adamant that he never looks at the passport of a player – only his talent.

Joachim ‘Joegi’ Loew is obviously much more restricted in his options. Even though Germany is slowly reaping the benefits of improved coaching regimes at youth level and more and more youngsters are coming through the Bundesliga ranks, the overall number of available players of the requisite standard is still far short of triple figures. In today’s globalised football world, this artificial limit on resources can only be described as anachronistic. But to the German manager’s great credit, his thoroughly modern training exercises – attacking moves are constantly repeated, collective pressing and defending is high on the agenda and individualised fitness programmes give the team the strength to play their offensive game – have overcome this quantitative deficit.

In the process, he has, ironically, built a bridge to the past, but not in Wenger’s negative sense of the word. Loew’s Germany can be considered a throwback to the pre-Bosman, pre-Champions League times of 25 years (or so) ago, when the national sides were naturally rated the best teams in the land. In the big four leagues – Spain, England, Italy and Germany – only Loew’s team could give the strongest club sides a real run for their money. But that’s how it should be, perhaps, even for the big nations.

That is not to say that world-class players like the prolific Luca Toni, his mercurial Bayern sidekick Franck Ribery or Werder’s Brazilian wizard Diego wouldn’t get into Loew’s first XI. Of course they would. But despite the individual class at their disposal, neither Bayern nor Werder are even close to Loew’s achievements when it comes to making a team bigger than the sum of its part. Experts agree that there has never been a better-prepared German team: some even wonder if this is the best white-and-black team ever.

While many bigger teams had severe problems in the qualifiers, Germany reached Euro 2008 with an ease that surprised even the most ardent optimists. After the collective euphoria of the World Cup, when Jurgen Klinsmann took an unfancied side into the semi-finals with some of the most entertaining football of the tournament, people wondered whether successor Loew could sustain the momentum.

It quickly became clear that the 48-year-old coach could actually do much better: he transformed the gung-ho style of Klinsmann into something altogether more balanced and stable – but without sacrificing the attacking philosophy in the process.

That he did so against the backdrop of long-term injuries to Chelsea’s Michael Ballack and Torsten Frings of Werder Bremen, as well as the disappointing post-World Cup form of Bastian Schweinsteiger and Lukas Podolski at Bayern, has been particularly impressive. Loew has shown that success on this level is no mystery, but the result of clever planning and innovative work. Similar scientific methods have long been employed at Europe’s top clubs but on the international level, Germany is currently on its own.

General manager Oliver Bierhoff had to turn down the reformist rhetoric in order not to upset the Bundesliga clubs but Bayern’s appointment of Klinsmann as their next manager vindicated both him and Loew’s methods. Even the Bavarian giants have realised that change was needed. The success of the national team has shaken the whole league out of its slumber.

It’s also hard to find another team among the 16 competitors who are as settled, both tactically and in terms of personnel, as Loew’s squad. Fitness permitting, his Germany are almost identical as far as the starting XI is concerned, but at the same time much stronger: new, young prospects like striker Mario Gomez of Stuttgart or comeback kid Kevin Kuranyi have only added to the many alternatives at Loew’s disposal. And his 4-4-2 system is resilient enough to function regardless of the specific line-up. He’s only lost two of his 20 matches in charge. Both were meaningless.

“Loew has his way and his system which he developed with the scout Urs Siegenthaler, who helps analyse players’ mistakes,” said an impressed Ottmar Hitzfeld. “They have a clear philosophy and you could say the system is more important than the players. The players change, the system doesn’t and you still have success.”

But the facts remains Germany have not won a match in the Euros since Oliver Bierhoff scored a golden goal to win the Wembley final against the Czech Republic in 1996.

Loew has warned against complacency and sees the Euro as “the most difficult tournament possible”. Even captain Ballack maintains that sides like Italy or France profess more individual talent. “I see us peaking at the World Cup 2010,” said Ballack.

But Franz Beckenbauer is not alone in regarding them as favourites for Euro 2008. This is the first competition since the 1994 World Cup where Germany feel that they could – perhaps should – really win it.

You can easily see the whole of the country getting swept up in the patriotic flag-waving extravaganza again. Uli Hoeness, the Bayern general manager, has admitted that he was wrong to think that club allegiances would become more important than the support for the national sides a few years.

If anything, the Klinsmann revolution has made the Germany side more popular than they’ve ever been.

The most beautiful, creative football in the world by a club side will never grip a whole country the way a successful run in a big tournament does, regardless of the style of football played. The reasons for this are sentimental and for that reason will never convince a purist like Wenger. But he might like Loew’s Germany, nevertheless. For they show us that a national side can indeed become a hothouse of innovation.

Patriotism and progress are not mutually exclusive, as the Brazilians have known for quite some time.