Borussia Dortmund is mired in a worsening crisis.
They are 10th in the Bundesliga, have not won a game in 2025 and have just suffered three defeats in a week — against Bayer Leverkusen, Holstein Kiel and Eintracht Frankfurt. It leaves head coach Nuri Sahin facing an endspiel — a final — in Bologna on Tuesday, with defeat in the Champions League likely to cost him his job.
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Does he deserve this? The club still believes in his future as a coach and desperately needs to avoid having to perform, but the scenario almost demands an intervention. In fact, Dortmund’s modest position in the league does not adequately describe the poverty of their form. Domestically, they have only won once away from home all season. This happened in Wolfsburg in December, in the last game before the winter break. The worst component was the magnitude of many of those defeats. Outside the Westfalenstadion, Dortmund looked lost. His football was marred by individual mistakes, but it was also characterised by a bad mood, a noxious haze of self-pity and entitlement descending around him, attack after attack.
Sahin publicly supported. After each recent defeat, he has received support from Lars Ricken or Sebastian Kehl, respectively the club’s general manager and sporting director. This has been met with harsh, even deeply personal, criticism.
“He has no charisma,” Mario Basler, a former Germany international, said on Sports1’s Doppelpass programme a week ago. “You can’t take it seriously. “
Basler is a provocative pundit and Doppelpass is always a forum for strident views, but even in the local media Sahin has found support hard to come by. In the face of overwhelming pressure, the internal confidence has dwindled sharply in recent days, too.
“We don’t want to discuss Sahin,” Ricken told Sky Deutschland after the 4-2 loss to Holstein Kiel on Tuesday. “Nuri is not in discussion. Rather, it is the players who will have to question themselves. ”
Kiel, last in the table with the smallest budget in the league after promotion, led 3-0 at half-time in this match and it may have been worse. Ricken described those forty-five minutes as “unworthy” and kind; the popular of some individual performances is embarrassing and is right to point the finger at the accuser, despite the fact that Dortmund scored two comfort goals behind.
In the end, the defeat earned the players a public reprimand from the traveling ultras. No one can simply argue that this is undeserved or, in some individual cases, that it should have been done a long time ago.
On Friday, Dortmund played more respectably but still lost 2-0 in Frankfurt. But Ricken’s defiance over Sahin’s future had clearly softened.
“Nuri will also be on the bench against Bologna,” he told DAZN after the match. “But with the clear hope that we want victories. “
Hoping or hopeful? It was an act of faith. Sahin, a former Dortmund player, returned to the club in January 2024 as assistant to Edin Terzic. Having benefited from the club’s reputation until last season’s Champions League final (against Real Madrid), Sahin was promoted when Terzic left, despite having only two years of senior coaching experience from his time. in Antalyaspor of the Turkish Super League.
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Sahin was Terzic’s advice for the position. Having had a positive effect on the team’s attacking football since his arrival, his appointment had technical merit. But the most powerful facet of his candidacy turns out to be his past. Sahin not only graduated from the club’s youth academy and played more than two hundred games for the first team, but he was also born locally and grew up as a Dortmund fan.
This counts at the Westfalenstadion. Nowhere else in the Bundesliga is there such acceptance among former players. Ricken scored the decisive third goal in the 1997 Champions League final against Juventus. Kehl is a former club captain. His predecessor as sporting director, Michael Zorc, played almost 500 games for Dortmund in the 1980s and 1990s. Matthias Sammer, one of the club’s most important players, is also a consultant.
Dortmund his team. Maybe too much.
Hans-Joachim Watzke, the club’s general manager, will leave this summer. Anticipating his departure, Ricken promoted academy director to his newly created existing position in May 2024. This was a position that Kehl had coveted but overlooked, causing him great distress. disappointment. In public, both spoke affectionately about each other, but the relationship between them is not the easiest.
This context frames the football scene in a scenario that invites criticism. The existing squad is unbalanced and understaffed in key areas, adding left back, midfield and center back.
While Dortmund retain a reputation as astute talent-spotters able to generate vast profits by identifying outstanding potential, there are few players at the club now — English winger Jamie Gittens aside — who belong in that category.
Other associations disappeared. Even even although Dortmund still has the identity of a rapid and dynamic football team, this taste is just a memory. Sahin is their 5th permanent head trainer in seven years and it displays just how weak the logo of football has become. Dortmund is just some other football team. They’re no longer one of the ones sides that stylish other folks insist you glance at.
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Sahin was intended to be a restorative meeting. He is someone who can encourage the progression of youngsters’ skills and get the team back into betting in an emotional and engaging way.
But — crucially — the conviction in that belief seems to have come from how it might have felt had he been successful. The old player bringing back the old Dortmund. The former Jurgen Klopp player making 80,000 people in the Westfalenstadion feel the way they used to. It’s vague but seductive. Who would not want that to work?
So far, this is the case.
A dispassionate evaluation of Sahin’s performance would recognise the good.
If Dortmund win in Bologna, they would be on course to qualify for the last 16 of the Champions League, without the desire for a play-off. Sahin has also overseen Gittens’ progression into one of the most exciting wingers in Europe and the immediate evolution of Felix Nmecha, who seems to have symptoms of fitting into an orchestrating midfielder.
There are also asterisks, as Sahin had to suffer injuries, especially in defense. Against Leverkusen 10 days ago, he was left without a fit, single centre-back and was forced to give two youngsters, 21-year-old Yannik Luhrs and 18-year-old Almugera Kabar, their initial debuts on the same night, in the same defensive group, against the defending champions.
So there are mitigation measures, but the negative aspects are inevitable. Dortmund have scored 24 fewer goals than league leaders Bayern Munich this season and have conceded more than twice as many. But what is even more worrying is the recurring suspicion that many senior players have not joined this direction; Even with a team made up of experienced players (Emre Can, Julian Brandt, Pascal Gross, Waldemar Anton) there is a clear lack of leadership on the field. This season, Dortmund have conceded the first goal five times in an away game in the Bundesliga. They lost all five games.
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That statistic makes an abstract, hard-to-substantiate criticism, but then this is a nebulous era at Dortmund, where the belief is no longer in the tactical tenets, but in the culture of the club itself. The right decision, it seems, is always the one that generates the warmest feeling. What do Dortmund need? It’s always more black and yellow — more of themselves.
Maybe Sahin is the answer, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s the problem.
(Top photo: Alex Grimm/Getty Images)