When Borussia Dortmund’s coach Edin Terzić mused a few weeks back that his plan for the season had been to make his team “less sexy, more successful,” you could have imagined his counterpart at Newcastle United, Eddie Howe, nodding with approval. The latter’s express speed improvement of one of English football’s perennial underachievers in the past two years has been dizzying, remarkable and laudable but, unlike the high points of the first Kevin Keegan era, built more on sweat than swagger.
After Dortmund’s 2-0 Champions League win over Newcastle on Tuesday, Howe may well have furthered a grudging admiration for Terzić, and may see even more parallels for where he wants to take his players in the future. The German side, who have helped develop the careers of US stars such as Gio Reyna and Christian Pulisic, have beaten Newcastle twice in less than two weeks, home and away, with pragmatic, measured football that on both occasions made the Geordies look as green as the glowing away jerseys that they sported for their match in North Rhine-Westphalia. As well as being an indicator of where Newcastle, a very differently run and funded club than Dortmund, may need to improve in order to be able to replicate their hosts’ consistent presence in the Champions League, Tuesday’s game reminded us that the Bundesliga giants have drifted from the recipe that made them such a popular ‘second favourite team’ for many – just as Newcastle had been during the mid-90s heyday of Keegan.
When the world looks at Borussia Dortmund, much of it still sees the parameters built around Jürgen Klopp’s successful team a decade ago. The image of a young, vibrant entity. Heavy metal football, the Yellow Wall, a catalogue of colour and thrills, defying the odds until big, bad Bayern Munich come to take their best players away. Around the time of the 2013 Champions League final in London (lost, at the last, to Bayern of course) Echte Liebe – true love – became the marketing catchphrase aiming to distil the feeling around the club and its atmospheric Signal Iduna Park stadium. It spawned later attempts to do the same, to quantify high emotion for commercial purposes, as Liverpool did with their This Means More tagline. The two clubs share more than just an anthem.
The cliche now often trumps the reality, a cliche that annoys many of those regulars on the Yellow Wall, even if the club has worked hard to retain BVB’s authenticity (keeping only a small portion of tickets for general sale, for example) while continuing to work on its internationalisation. Yet after the perceived pinnacle of 2013, an evolution of sorts was inevitable. It had already begun in the wake of the first of two successive Bundesliga titles under Klopp, in 2011 and 2012.
That 2011 championship had been astounding, a true fairytale, achieved on a modest budget (at the time BVB, famously, had a lower wage bill than Queens Park Rangers) only six years after the club had faced financial and institutional ruin. As they celebrated the title in an ecstatic Borsigplatz, the site of the club’s birthplace in 1909, the future was already upon them. Influential midfielder Nuri Sahin stood on crutches amid delirious fans that day knowing he had already agreed a move to Real Madrid, and the sense of a gang of mates against the world playing for kicks rather than for cash had clear limits. Success is one thing. Repeating it is expensive. Good players, successful players, want and deserve to be paid.
Maintaining, building and rebuilding was time-consuming and expensive, and a big part of Dortmund’s (re)growing pains. The detail of it is often glossed over. Take one of the biggest BVB cliches, that Bayern summarily storm in and pinch their best players. Since Klopp took the Dortmund job in 2008, 10 players have moved between Bayern and Dortmund – with six of those signing for the latter. The examples of Mario Götze and Robert Lewandowski leaving Westfalen for Bavaria in 2013 and 2014 stick in the mind (naturally enough, as key pieces from Klopp’s beloved team), but they are far from the norm. Such has been Dortmund’s success in nurturing young talent (one of the tropes that is actually true) that Jadon Sancho and Erling Haaland, for example, were both beyond Bayern’s financial means.
It is necessary to understand where the club came from in the 20th century, before being touched by the hand of Klopp. Borussia Dortmund were big spenders as well as winners, particularly after becoming the first German club to float on the stock exchange in 2000, a move Bayern always considered far too risky. That thought was firmly endorsed by Dortmund’s brush with oblivion in 2005. There is a before and after 2005 for the club. Since, there has always been a handbrake on spending. So since Klopp’s team touched the world in 2013, there has been a conflict at the heart of the club’s existence. Build, grow, be the big club that you always have been – but never let yourself saunter anywhere near the edge of the precipice again.
This is not a concern that is likely to trouble Newcastle in the short to medium term, of course. The only real financial quandary of the Saudi-owned club is how to spend what it wants to without incurring the wrath of Uefa’s Financial Fair Play watchdogs. Like Dortmund, however, Newcastle face a reckoning in terms of what they want to be on the pitch. Their own growing pains have been apparent in the Premier League this season. Howe’s team are not always comfortable in being front foot, rather than reactive, as they will increasingly be expected and required to be. It certainly was not after going a goal down to Niclas Füllkrug’s first-half opener on Tuesday.
Terzić’s team may be more comfortable in their own skin, but only just. It is a while since Dortmund have had a team that are a pressing, counterattacking monster, so the more sedate pace of BVB compared to yesteryear is not that new, nor is it tied to the current coach, a former terrace diehard at Signal Iduna Park himself. The word that is the case is not quite out yet, though. The enduring image is at odds with the reality, though significant Champions League progress this season could change that.
Newcastle, and Howe, may have pointers that they would like to take from Dortmund and Terzić. The latter show, however, that defining oneself clearly is a continuous, and arduous, process.
This is the latest article in the Guardian US’s series Over there, a look at US players in Europe and the clubs they play for. You can read more articles from the series here.
