Borussia Dortmund are twisting in the wind.
Head coach Nuri Sahin was dismissed on Tuesday night, just seven months after being appointed. To prevent the season from spiralling out of control, the club are aiming to make a short-term appointment to replace him in the coming days.
The favourite for that role is Niko Kovac, who has managed Croatia, Eintracht Frankfurt, Bayern Munich, Monaco and Wolfsburg. The 53-year-old would likely take charge until the end of the season, with the option of a renewal in the summer.
The task is onerous. Dortmund’s on-pitch plight — they are ninth in the Bundesliga — means they are not a particularly attractive proposition and standards are sliding off the field, too.
By far the most common criticism of Dortmund this season has been aimed at their away form. They have been too easy to beat away from the Westfalenstadion for too long — they have registered one Bundesliga win on the road all season — and, often, those losses have been meek.
The players have not been losing cheerfully, but rarely have they raged against those defeats, either, with senior figures not shouldering enough of the burden.
Niko Kovac is a contender to replace Nuri Sahin at Dortmund (Max Ellerbrake – Firo Sportphoto/Getty Images)
The exits of Mats Hummels and Marco Reus last summer left a leadership void that needed to be filled. Hummels had a habit of being bracingly honest — to a fault, at times — but he provided accountability. The extent to which that was true has perhaps been revealed in the months since his contract expired.
Life was not wonderful with Hummels and terrible without — that is far too neat — but the absence of personality is now particularly striking, never more so than during the defeat by Holstein Kiel last week. By the end of the first half in Kiel, Dortmund were 3-0 down. It actually could have been worse. An opponent whose wage budget is roughly 10 per cent of Dortmund’s could have scored five.
It brought into question the team’s character and those responsible for upholding it — and those issues have been exacerbating technical flaws all season, of which there are also many.
Sahin committed the side to building up from the back when, at times — particularly in defence — players looked uncomfortable doing so. He wanted his Dortmund to be pressure-resistant. Whether they were suited to playing that way is a different issue.
At times, although it is a hard criticism to substantiate, the team’s fitness levels looked low. According to official Bundesliga data, Dortmund players have made only the ninth-most sprints (4,126) in the league this season, the 14th-most intensive runs (12,768) and covered the 14th-highest distance. Running data is limited in what it describes, but this is not a high-intensity team nor one determined to overcome its limitations through force of will.
More succinctly, there was a gap between the football Sahin wanted to play, and that which the players were capable (or willing) to execute.
The mission for his successor starts with reconfiguring the team’s personality and asking for much more from the many highly experienced internationals within it. Sometimes football is complicated. Other times, simple. There needs to be a very direct conversation about standards and a hard dose of affronting honesty.
Away from the pitch, the issues need a gentler and more thoughtful remedy.
There is no question that recruiting standards have slipped at Dortmund — or at least that the club’s aims in the transfer market have become opaque. That reflects the department itself, which exuded disharmony from the beginning of the season.
Lars Ricken, the sporting CEO, sat at the top of the footballing structure, above Sebastian Kehl, the sporting director, and Sven Mislintat, the former chief scout who was returning to the club as squad planner. But as early as August, local and national media were reporting tension and internal disagreements within that power structure.
The detail and culpability are less important than the consequences. Dortmund were once a finishing school for the next generation of talent. Jude Bellingham, Erling Haaland and Jadon Sancho all passed through, each getting better and more valuable in the process. In the present day, only English winger Jamie Gittens and perhaps Felix Nmecha are destined for the top of the game.
A jarring reflection is that talent that would previously have matured in the Ruhr is now being developed elsewhere. It is interesting, for instance, to note the number of players at, or recently sold by, other Bundesliga clubs who, in a different era, could be imagined playing for Dortmund. At Eintracht Frankfurt (Omar Marmoush, Hugo Ekitike, Randal Kolo Muani), Stuttgart (Enzo Millot) and RB Leipzig (Antonio Nusa, Lois Openda, Benjamin Sesko).
In some instances, that reflects improvement at, or advantages held by those other clubs. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion, though, that Dortmund are not as good as they once were at mapping the sport’s future and attracting its finest talent.
In recent years, there has also been an obvious shift towards more short-term solutions. Since the summer of 2023, Marcel Sabitzer, Niclas Fullkrug, Pascal Gross, Ramy Bensebaini and Serhou Guirassy — all of whom were in their late twenties or older — have been signed for €60million (£51m; $62m). The club’s biggest signing between 2018 and the present day was the €31m spent on Sebastien Haller, who has just been loaned to Utrecht.
Some of those signings have made strong contributions at important moments. None of them are bad players but nor were they indicative of a future direction. They are players who sustain a team’s position over an 18-to-24-month period. None of them were going to improve dramatically after arriving. Barring Fullkrug and his inflated transfer to West Ham United, none were going to leave Dortmund for more than they arrived, either.
Buying young players and selling them for a profit is a simple take on football’s economics. That is the aim of so many European clubs that it can hardly be called a strategy. In addition, the better talent identification has become across the continent, the harder a club like Dortmund have found it to maintain their advantages and their image. That is a struggle now, rather than necessarily a failure.
But without a selling point, it is difficult to know what they stand for. That is obstructive for players, who want to achieve at the very top of the game or otherwise earn a move towards it, and supporters, who always need to have a grasp of a team’s direction and grow understandably despondent when they cannot find one.
Currently, Dortmund do not make sense. They remain in thrall to their yesterdays, their past and their former players, while their present and future slip away.
(Top photo: Alexandre Simoes/Borussia Dortmund via Getty Images)
