Union Berlin U19

Brenden Aaronson and Taiwo Awoniyi both wore the shirt as teenagers before either had played a senior minute for anyone. That is what the Union Berlin youth setup has increasingly become known for producing, even as its A-Jugend side, the U19s, plays its football away from headlines, in the DFB Junioren Pokal and, when qualification allows, the UEFA Youth League.

The team draws on the same academy pipeline that has fed the first team steadily rather than spectacularly. Aljoscha Kemlein and Lennard Maloney are part of a run of graduates that also includes Laurenz Dehl, Maurice Opfermann and Mert Kömür. The value has been in the pathway itself, in players going from the youth pitches to the Alte Försterei rather than in cups won along the way.

The senior club carries a lineage back to a Köpenick side founded in 1906, though the current identity dates from a re-establishment in 1966, and the youth ranks inherit the nickname Die Eisernen along with the red and white. What they do not inherit, at least not yet, is a fixture with the weight of the Berlin Derby against Hertha BSC, a rivalry sharpened by the divide the city once carried and, from the GDR years, by an older and rawer enmity with BFC Dynamo. Those matches belong to the first team's history for now, but they are the rivalry any Köpenick youngster coming through the U19s is eventually measured against.