There is an obvious contradiction in the center of Borussia Dortmund. The BVB logo, the yellow and black that is the overall one, is based on the concept that this Super Club, finalists of the Champions League in June, are a little more to their rivals.
The 80,000 fans inside the Westfalenstadion, plus the 25,000 crammed into the large grandstand at the south end of the stadium, create a unique sound and story. Football as it is planned to be, as the Bundesliga speech says. We don’t buy superstars here, we build them.
In part, defining Dortmund is also about what they are not. Speak to people within the club and they will say they want to be as big as they can be, but not be Bayern Munich. Dortmund are massive. But the message is that they are also a family. You have to get it.
It has informed their recent coaching appointments. Edin Terzic had a compelling tale. He had stood on the Yellow Wall as a boy before taking the club to the brink of a first Bundesliga triumph in a decade and, of course, that trip to Wembley last season.
When Terzic and Dortmund were forced to admit that something would possibly be missing to finish the job, the club did not yet turn to a wonderful coach for a wonderful club, but to one of their own. Former player and local boy Nuri Sahin took over.
Sahin is a Dortmund boy and one of the big winners in this part of the Ruhr region. Speaking to him for a while after returning from Dortmund, he explained it in emotional terms. “I listened to the center and my center said the club wants you to come back and help the club. “
Were it not the case that his name had already been woven into Dortmund’s history, across two spells as a player, then his time in charge of Turkish club Antalyaspor would have been unlikely to have been persuasive enough for him to have been asked.
Sahin, who initially returned as Terzic’s assistant, is an unusually bright individual and a keen student of the game. But the adjustment to taking the top job at a European giant proved difficult. He leaves them languishing in the bottom half of the Bundesliga table.
Four consecutive defeats in January accentuated this decline, when it was a defeat against Holsten Kiel in which Dortmund led 3 at half-time and conceded a fourth even after their human games had been reduced to 10 men.
It is far from being in Sahin. The high-tempo football logo that Dortmund missed is not so transparent now. Even the recruiting strategy has become less defined. Against San Pauli in October, the average age of the starting lineup was almost 29.
But Dortmund have won just once in nine games outside the Bundesliga, look hopelessly disjointed and have put up performances stifled through mistakes after performances blown up through mistakes. Faith in Sahin has evaporated with attempts at afforestation through long-term defeat. in Bologna he showed too much.
Is it time to reconsider the entire strategy? During a scale in the city at the beginning of this season, that was the question they apparently asked General Manager Carsten Cramer. It seemed a harmful idea to say it in its offices, but do you want to be a Dortmund boy?
After all, this is a club that has won the Champions League just once, their defining moment in 1997, and that triumph came under Ottmar Hitzfeld, a German who had been born on the Swiss border, playing and coaching in Switzerland for much of his life.
His only German team as a player had been VfB Stuttgart. Their other great coach, Jurgen Klopp, is a Swabian, who had a long association with Mainz not Dortmund before leading the club to back-to-back titles and even coming to embody the club’s spirit.
If the two greatest coaches in Dortmund history are outsiders who have raised the prestige and mystery of the club like no local coach before or since, then why have Cramer and his team targeted coaches who are happy with winning Dortmund than winning what winning what winning Dortmund shaping?
“That’s a question,” Cramer told Sky Sports.
“Ottmar Hitzfeld was not hired and Jurgen Klopp was not hired because they were not from Dortmund. So I would say we were looking for the most productive guys that they should have in that scenario and that we took Hitzfeld and then we took Klopp.
“Now we live in other times and, yes, it is more than a simple one that Nuri Sahin is a type of Dortmund, Lars Ricken [CEO of Sports] is a type of Dortmund and at least Sebastian Kehl [Sports Director] as well.
Cramer added: “We are very happy that we have Dortmund guys but it is not a strategy just to hire Dortmund guys. Lars will explain to you, the guy running the youth department never played for Dortmund and it was Lars who invited him to work for Dortmund.
“The assistant coaches of Nuri Sahin, there is Lukasz [Piszczek] of course, but the others are coming from different places. So it is something which is good to have but it is not a clear demand by the club that we just should take Dortmund guys.”
But the guiding precept is laudable. Dortmund deserves never to be a springboard. “We believe that continuity and commitment to this club and not hunting at the club as a step in his career to advance as temporarily as imaginable is a great merit at this time. “
Cramer added: “It is not something that is done because we have the old approach, but we know that the Dortmund mentality is very special and the greater the identity with the club, the more comfortable we feel. “
Anticipate the answer. Comfortable? Is that the purpose here?”I would say, let’s see,” he admits. Come back in two, 3 or 4 years, ask me and I hope I’m right. And if not, I must say that you asked the right question. “
This query was asked two months ago, not two years ago. But Dortmund was forced to pivot. We communicate a lot about culture and it’s obviously important. And yet, it’s not really about someone being beyond their future. Dortmund may start looking into theirs.