There is an apparent contradiction at the heart of Borussia Dortmund. The BVB brand, the yellow and black popular all over the world, is built on the idea that this super club, Champions League finalists in June, are a little different from their rivals.
The 80,000 fans in the Westfalenstadion, 25,000 packed into the enormous stand on the south side of the stadium, provide a unique sound and story. Football as it was meant to be, as the Bundesliga game puts it. They don't buy superstars here, they build them.
In part, defining Dortmund is also about what they are not. Talk to people within the club and they will say they want to be as big as they can be, but not Bayern Munich. Dortmund is huge. But the message is that they are also a family. You gotta get it.
It has informed their recent coaching engagements. Edin Terzic had a compelling story. He had been on the Yellow Wall as a boy before taking the club to the brink of a first Bundesliga win in a decade, and of course that trip to Wembley last season.
When both Terzic and Dortmund had to admit that he might lack that little bit to get the job done, the club turned not to a super coach from a super club, but – again – to one of their own. Former player and local boy Nuri Sahin took over.
Sahin is from Dortmund and that trumps a lot in this part of the Ruhr area. When he spoke to him shortly after his return to Dortmund, he explained it in emotional terms. “I listened to my heart and my heart said the club needs you, so go back and help the club.”
Had it not been for the fact that his name was already woven into Dortmund's history during two spells as a player, his time as manager of Turkish club Antalyaspor would probably not have been compelling enough to have prompted him.
Sahin, who initially returned as Terzic's assistant, is an unusually smart person and an enthusiastic 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.
Four defeats in a row in January have highlighted the decline, the second of which was a defeat at then bottom club Holsten Kiel, in which Dortmund trailed by three at half-time and conceded a fourth even after their lowly opponents had been reduced to ten.
This doesn't all have to do with Sahin. The fast brand of football that Dortmund was famous for is no longer so evident. Even the recruitment strategy has become less defined. Against St Pauli in October, the average age of the starting line-up was almost 29 years.
But Dortmund have won just once in nine Bundesliga away games, look hopelessly disjointed and produce one error-laden performance after another. Faith in Sahin has evaporated and attempts to continue talking about the long term have become untenable. The defeat in Bologna on Tuesday proved too much.
Is it time to rethink the entire strategy? When visiting the city earlier this season, it was an obvious question to ask director Carsten Cramer. It felt like a dangerous thought to express in their office, but do you really have to be a Dortmund man?
After all, this is a club that has only won the Champions League once, their defining moment in 1997, and that victory came under the leadership of Ottmar Hitzfeld, a German who was born on the Swiss border and played much of his life in Switzerland and coached. to live.
His only German team as a player was VfB Stuttgart. Their other great coach, Jurgen Klopp, is a Swabian, who had a long association with Mainz and not with Dortmund before leading the club to consecutive titles and even came to embody the spirit of the club.
If the two greatest coaches in Dortmund's history are both outsiders who elevated the club's prestige and mystique like no local coach has before or since, why are Cramer and his team fixated on coaches who only get Dortmund instead of shaping?
“It's a good question,” Cramer told Sky Sports.
“Ottmar Hitzfeld wasn't hired and Jurgen Klopp wasn't hired because they weren't from Dortmund. So I would say we were looking for the best guys available in that situation and we decided to take Hitzfeld and then we decided on Klopp to take.
“Now we have a different time and yes, it is more than just a coincidence that Nuri Sahin is a Dortmund man, Lars Ricken [sporting CEO] is a Dortmund man and in any case Sebastian Kehl [sporting director] also. I would say it suits us at the moment.”
Cramer added: “We are very happy to have Dortmund boys, but it is not a strategy to only hire Dortmund boys. Lars will explain it to you: the man who runs the youth department has never played for Dortmund and it was Lars who invited him to come and work.” for Dortmund.
“Nuri Sahin's assistant coaches, there is Lukasz [Piszczek] Of course, but the others come from different places. So it's something that's good to have, but it's not a clear requirement from the club that we just have to hire Dortmund players.”
But the guiding principle is commendable. Dortmund should never be a springboard. “We think that continuity and commitment to this club and not seeing the club as a step in your career to progress as quickly as possible is a great advantage in today's times.”
Cramer added: “Nothing is being done because we complain about the previous approach, but we know that the Dortmund mentality is very special and the higher the identification with the club, the more we feel comfortable with it.”
He anticipates the reaction. Comfortable? Is that really the goal here? “I'd say let's see,” he admits. “Come back in two, three or four years, ask me the question again and hopefully I'm right. And if not, I have to say you asked the right question.”
That question was asked two months ago, not two years. But Dortmund has been forced to turn around. There is a lot of talk about culture and it is clearly important. And yet this is certainly not about a person's past, but about his future. Maybe Dortmund should take a look at theirs.
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