BVB: Weak leadership, moody players – the crisis has many reasons

BVB: Weak leadership, moody players – the crisis has many reasons

Football Bundesliga
Weak leadership, moody players: nothing is right at BVB at the moment


BVB is playing its weakest first half of the season in ten years. It will probably cost coach Sahin his job, even if he is not solely to blame for the misery.

After the final whistle, the Dortmund professionals stood like repentant sinners in front of their followers in the foggy Holstein Stadium in Kiel. Nico Schlotterbeck and captain Emre Can even got involved in a discussion with an ultra who had fought his way to the advertising board and was waving his index finger at the professionals. One would have loved to have had a microphone on site at that moment to listen to the conversation. However, it doesn’t take much imagination to imagine the content. “You don’t run, you don’t fight, you play big crap together, you’re not a team.” That’s probably what the accusations were after the embarrassing 2:4 defeat. Schlotterbeck will have apologized. Perhaps in his distress he pointed out the wave of colds that had weakened himself and other professionals.

But even the most eloquent person in the world couldn’t have glossed over BVB’s performance against newly promoted Holstein Kiel. The end of the first half of the season was also their lowest point, drowned in the Kiel coastal fog. The interim balance at the halfway point of the season is catastrophic: Coach Nuri Sahin’s team is in tenth place in the table and is five points behind the Champions League places. It is the worst first half of the season in ten years, BVB is reeling.

There is disappointment and helplessness at BVB

Accordingly, the statements made by those responsible after the final whistle fluctuated between disappointment and perplexity. Sports director Lars Ricken, who will become the new overall boss from autumn 2025 when Hans-Joachim Watzke leaves as managing director, called the performance “unworthy to embarrassing”. Captain Can, now used to commenting on poor performances, dutifully blamed himself: “We players, me at the front, it doesn’t work like that. We can’t play like that.”

Coach Nuri Sahin seemed almost desperate. The moodiness of his team is a mystery to him: “With us it’s always the case that you don’t know what’s going to come out. That takes a lot of energy.”

The young coach is counted. Names like Erik ten Hag (formerly Ajax Amsterdam and Manchester United) or Roger Schmidt (formerly Bayer Leverkusen and Benfica Lisbon) are already being mentioned as possible successors. If Sahin fails to turn things around in the games against Eintracht Frankfurt and in the Champions League against FC Bologna, he will be released.

Nobody believes in a real turnaround under Sahin

If he even has a chance. Because no one really believes in a real turnaround. Sahin has not yet proven that he can get the moody team on track. The trust that he received as a new coach from the club management before the season has been used up.

The fluctuations in form of his troops are simply too extreme. Too often the team collapsed after good performances. There were serious defeats against top clubs in the Champions League such as Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, ​​and in the Bundesliga BVB is suffering from a blatant away weakness. Even the waves of injuries that have plagued the team cannot explain such ups and downs.

Sahin seems overwhelmed by the high demands and unreliable players. TV expert Dietmar Hamann pointed out that a top club like Borussia Dortmund cannot afford to be a training club for young coaches. Success is needed here – immediately. However, one look at Munich is enough to prove that things can work out differently: At FC Bayern, Vincent Kompany, who is only two years older and has similarly little experience, is doing a more successful job so far. In Dortmund the experiment with Sahin seems to have failed.

The fact that Sahin is still on the bench probably has something to do with the fact that he is expressly the man of the bosses, especially of sports director Sebastian Kehl. So far, public (!) criticism has been directed at the players, rather than the 36-year-old, even though he obviously makes mistakes. Sahin has the smell of a stable, after all, he once came to BVB as a twelve-year-old. His dismissal would be an admission by the club management that they had made a mistake. But now the crisis is actually too big to take it into account.

Source: Stern

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