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Borussia Dortmund 17/18 | Sky Germany: Lucien Favre to be next manager
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik @Rood and Imran @Annihilate Now! start with the good news by celebrating Manchester United Women's emphatic FA Cup win over Spurs at Wembley and the future of manager Marc Skinner.
Then it's the bad news and the ever worsening form of our Men with losses to Arsenal and Palace.
Finally the main debate - ETH Out now or keep him until the end of the season - if not longer. Are you Team Nik or Team Imran?
Their lack of everything.
Their attack is good enough to outscore 75% of Bundesliga.
Top level though their back 4 and keeper aren't good enough. Simple as that.
Top level though their back 4 and keeper aren't good enough. Simple as that.
I agree that their defensive play (wasn't Stöger supposed to fix that?) is in shambles. I Connect it to Weigl being out of form.
I don't understand why Dortmund doesn't try harder to hold on to their star players. Lewandowski, Hummels, Aubameyang, Dembele, they're all gone... no wonder that they are struggling so hard. Gotze and Reus just can't find their 2012-13 form when they had a fantastic partnership.
You can not force players to sign contracts like it is the Godfather.
What you mean try harder?
All of them wanted to leave. So what do you expect them to do? Handcuff them?
I don't think they were that bad defensively in previous matches (even with Weigl in), but their tactics for this match were the cause of their meltdown. Playing Castro and Dahoud, both of whom are not defensive midfielders against Bayern's attack and then following it with playing a high line was a reciepe for disaster.
Who will be manager next season?
Would love for them to be ambitious and go for someone like Jardim and he can build another fantastic free scoring team like he did at Monaco.
Would love for them to be ambitious and go for someone like Jardim and he can build another fantastic free scoring team like he did at Monaco.
Was at my girlfiend’s house in Schwerte on Saturday, which is very close to Dortmund so naturally her whole family are Dortmund supporters. Safe to say the atmosphere at the house was electric 
Whoever is at home and Dortmund if it's neutral ground.
Didn't some of them had contracts beyond the year when they were sold ? They could have done a Leicester-Mahrez and hold them to the end of the deal.
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Is he any good?
Gladbach had a stretch of relative success with him from 2011 to 2015, despite losing their best players (like Reus, Dante, ter Stegen, Kramer, Xhaka) basically every season.
Yeah, very decent coach. Looking forward to see what he can do with Dortmund.
he's perfect fit for them.
Oh alright. Cheers guys!
Hope he can get this club to defend properly. Could be a great move. .
Got him one season later than they wanted but a very good signing. I was afraid his reputation would fall again after Nice's bad start to the season but they've recovered well and are in the European places.
I think he'l do well, I clearly remember how he transformed Gladbach from side certain of relegation to one competing for European places. They had a solid defence with blistering counter-attacking, he can certainly do the same with Dortmund's squad. Actually thought he'd be a good coach for Arsenal as well.
I think he'l do well, I clearly remember how he transformed Gladbach from side certain of relegation to one competing for European places. They had a solid defence with blistering counter-attacking, he can certainly do the same with Dortmund's squad. Actually thought he'd be a good coach for Arsenal as well.
I think that's selling his time at Gladbach a bit short. His success there was pretty sensational, taking over an abysmal team on a hopeless last place in February 2011, saving them, and transforming them into a surefire CL/EL team from next season on. All this while establishing tactically and technically superb football, mixing counter-attacking and (later on) possession elements.
Plus player development: The ones you mention - like some others - only became top BL players under Favre in the first place, after having been brought in as cheap no-names (Xhaka is an exception).
There are still some caveats about long-term stability (ugly endings at Hertha & Gladbach, his second season at Nice seems to have been subpar too), and Dortmund is his biggest project to date at age 60. So nothing is guaranteed, of course. But the possible upsides are pretty big, as his strengths are exactly what the team needs for a rebuild, imo.
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I wanted to write in more enthusiastic terms first, but when I checked their league placements under him they were more mixed than my memory would have me believe, and thus, instead of writing a differentiated essay of many paragraphs, I cut it short
Oh yeah, my memory failed me too at that point: Gladbach missed the EL in 12/13. But still 1x CL, 1x CL qualifiers, 1x EL in the other three seasons after 2011.I wanted to write in more enthusiastic terms first, but when I checked their league placements under him they were more mixed than my memory would have me believe, and thus, instead of writing a differentiated essay of many paragraphs, I cut it short
All fine, I just wanted to bang the drum a bit. As I said, there are some question marks as well, but also lots of potential.
He took over Hertha in 07/08 after they had slipped into mediocrity, his second season there was deemed a huge success with them being within two points of first place with two matches to go and finishing 4th in the end. However the club was in bad shape financially and had to let go of their two strikers strikers Pantelic and Voronin and defensive chief Simunic without adequate replacements the following summer. In what turned out to be clusterfeck of a following season he was sacked after losing 6 of the opening 7 matches and the club got relegated 7 points from the relegation playoff spot.
He then took over Gladbach who were in and out of first division for the past decade or so before that. They were pretty hopeless dead last with a 7 points gap and 12 matches to go, but he managed to secure the relegation playoff, while conceding just 9 goals in those 12 matches (having conceded 56 in the 22 before that), making 18 year old ter Stegen his no1 GK in the process.
The following season he finished top 4 with them (the first single digit finish in 15 years with next to no investment over the summer, but again his team's spine was sold:
Reus to Dortmund, Dante to Bayern and Neustädter, back then his midfield general, to Schalke, without really providing adequate replacements (Luuk de Jong was a complete flop, Dominguez mediocre and Xhaka a raw kid). The following 8th and 6th finishes were probably on par with the clubs very modest spending and the overall expectation. In 14/15 however he took them to 3rd, their best finish since the 80s. But the following season he lost the opening five matches before stepping down and that one can't simply be explained by transfers, because the guy who followed him had a pretty good run and finished fourth still.
I'm no expert of French football, but at Nice it seems to have been the same pattern all over again, his first season was a spectacular success, then his squad gets gutted and the following season is a struggle.
Tactically I think he is somewhere in the middle: his teams are very well organized at the back and adept at pressing and counter attacking, while also knowing how to structure attacks and have a clean build up, but without pushing possession to extremes like Pep, Tuchel or Bosz. He should be a good tactical fit for Dortmund, stabilizing them with a good defensive concept, but also being open to enabling their attacking talent. He also seems to be quite variable in terms of formations, using mainly a 442 at Gladbach, but switching between 433ish and 352ish formations at Nice.
Another strong suit of his seems to be the development of youngsters: at a very modest club like Gladbach he helped players like Reus, ter Stegen, Xhaka, Dahoud and Dante make the step to top clubs and Kruse also made a big leap under him, despite later messing up his career with his lack of discipline. Some of them, especially Reus, still speak very highly of him, even years later.
The biggest question marks regarding Favre are probably his lack of EL/CL experience, which is understandable given the clubs he's coached, but might still cause problems.
And also his character. First of all he is very reserved in public, which might not be a problem by itself, but since every Dortmund coach nowadays gets compared to Klopp it will be used against him when things don't go so well. Secondly Max Eberl, Gladbach's DoF, said that during their shared time at Gladbach there were several occasions when Favre wanted to step down and had to be talked out of it, until his last season when Favre hosted his own press conference to publicly step down after the club didn't accept his private offer to do so.
Eberl still speaks very highly of Favre, but of curse you've got to wonder how well he's going to deal with the pressure at Dortmund if it apparently was already a problem at Gladbach.
Everything considered I'd say that Favre is the best Dortmund could do with Tuchel and Klopp already being exes and out of reach anyway and Nagelsmann not getting out of his contract until next summer. Especially with Reus as the Talisman and most likely future captain of the team being a big fan of his.
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Great read. Stability is what Dortmund need right now but as you mentioned, his teams suddenly fall off a cliff after a good season. Wouldn't this be an issue? The board won't stop selling their prized assets, it remains to be seen whether bvb would be in the same situation after two years
Yes, I forgot to mention that under question marks. At Gladbach the initial drop-off from 4th to 8th wasn't that bad and he improved via 6th to 3rd again, so nothing like falling off a cliff there. His exit is of course something else but since I'm not sure how to explain it I don't really know what to make of it one way or the other and besides, having a coach stay for four years would already be a big improvement for Dortmund at this point. At Nice the initial drop-off seems to have been sharper, but it looks like he has turned things around by now, being still within reach of an EL spot at the moment (though probably missing it).
Generally speaking Dortmund is the same like Gladbach, Hertha or Nice, where 3/4 top 4 hangovers can be explained vial transfers. Sure they lose key players, but it's not like they (have to) cash in on every little success, they try to stagger their departures, so not too much substance is lost at once and when someone does the coach doesn't get Luuk de Jong for Reus or Sneijder for Belhanda, he gets Dembele for Mkhitaryan, Götze for Gündogan, Bartra and Akanji for Hummels, Batshuayi for Aubameyang, Aubameyang for Lewandowski and overall a much broader squad, so when Yarmolenko is out of form and then gets injured Sancho and Philipp are already waiting, eager and ready to perform. Which makes it a completely different situation to his former clubs.
He is perfectly able to do what Sarri is doing with Napoli. He will make them play like a team, they will play his style of football meaning possession football with fast transition, you could see him as a mix between Klopp and Tuchel, so in theory most players will fit perfectly. Though he shares a flaw with Tuchel, they are too happy to tweak things which can sometimes unsettle players.
Sounds very promising for dortmund. Hopefully things fall in place for them again
Well their intentions are good:
They've hired the most experienced and esteemed German speaking coach available to them, they brought Sammer back into the club as an advisor to the upper management, they created a new post for (Klopp's captain) Kehl, who is supposed to be a relay between the squad and the management, being more involved with them than the DoF, keeping an ear to the ground so to speak and they are talking about rebuilding the squad, adding a bit more combativeness and taking a look at the mentality.
On the other hand intentions by themselves are worthless. They could come out of this with newfound strength or they could find that they can't shift and buy the players they want to or perhaps buy a flop or two and continue to stagnate.
Great appointment for Dortmund, big fan of his work as a coach and post by DO.OB is good summary of his spells in the major leagues.
Hopefully this will get them back on track after their wasted season.
Hopefully this will get them back on track after their wasted season.
So that's mean no Nagelsmann next year...
Well Favre is also ok. I'm "concerned" about his European campaigns that have always been a bit disappointing. I admit his teams were too young But It stays a question. Would he be ok to at least succeed the groups stage. It wasn't the main deal in BMG but surely Dortmund would want to come Back in the regular CL teams
His experience is a very good point. His 1st season in Ligue 1 was very good as he reached an incredible 3rd place and kind of ended the title battle by beating PSG. Too bad his regularity's issues came back in the 2nd season, like the time he was at BMG even if for that case, The board is way more responsible.
Anyway that sounds promising with all the talented players BVB has. He has a balanced system. They just need to find a replacement for Sokratis I heard, I would also say Schmelzer, and a striker
Well Favre is also ok. I'm "concerned" about his European campaigns that have always been a bit disappointing. I admit his teams were too young But It stays a question. Would he be ok to at least succeed the groups stage. It wasn't the main deal in BMG but surely Dortmund would want to come Back in the regular CL teams
His experience is a very good point. His 1st season in Ligue 1 was very good as he reached an incredible 3rd place and kind of ended the title battle by beating PSG. Too bad his regularity's issues came back in the 2nd season, like the time he was at BMG even if for that case, The board is way more responsible.
Anyway that sounds promising with all the talented players BVB has. He has a balanced system. They just need to find a replacement for Sokratis I heard, I would also say Schmelzer, and a striker
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Just googled and he's already 60 years old. Thought he will be abit younger than that. How much are Dortmund are planning to get out of him?
What?
60 isn’t old for a football manager especially in this short term era of football managers. Dortmund won’t get another manager who will manage to stay as long as Klopp for a long time.
Don't worry mate, i was just being curious as i thought he was one of those up and coming young managers who is on the rise and hype, like Tuchel or Klopp in his Dortmund days
Wasn't Favre almost appointed last season, but the deal got canceled? It's a good choice, Favre made a very remarkable work at NICE.
Don Jupp: *laughs in old*