And before you say 'oh, well management should have said no to schurrle', do you really think that they should go ahead and buy players that the manager does not want ? You can find many examples of this, and how wrong that has gone. Things are a lot more complicated than they seem and it's easy for us to sit in our armchairs criticizing the direction of things when many of us haven't a clue as to what is truly going on.
You guys know more about this than I do, but thoroughly incompetent is a bit harsh I would think. True enough the whole Tuchel thing was managed poorly. From a distance it looked as if senior management hoped the lads would "work it out" so they straddled the fence.In the end they let a cancer foster for far too long and the surgery for removal pretty much cost them this season and maybe CL next season. They ended up losing a brilliant coach with no clear plan of succession with is indeed a grievous error, but they also lost one of the best scouts in the world which could be even more damaging long term. As the only publicly traded company in all football they also have a competitive disadvantage when it comes to transfer dealings since they have disclosure laws that apply only to them. The football is not producing trophies at the moment, but it is immensely profitable, and that is not exactly incompetent. TT is a great tactician but by all accounts he is an insufferable prick to work for/with and I don't think that we can blame Watzke for that.
There's no doubt that Tuchel had a hand in bringing in some of the chaff on this roster, but some of it is on Watzke/Zorc; there's no reason to believe that Tuchel wanted, for example, Rode. At the end of the day the buck for the roster and the decisions made with regards to it stops with them. And plus, I'd take Tuchel back any day of the week and twice on Sundays if he wanted to come back. He was relatively successful in Dortmund and you got the sense he was building something. The moves made this summer and hiring Bosz, and losing Mislintat despite the management backing him over Tuchel have set the club back and been generally disastrous. Stöger seems to have brought back respectability, but he's not the answer either. Watzke deserves serious criticism for why the club has appeared to stagnate and deteriorate and why we lack direction under his leadership. Why they can't seem to get Aubameyang to act professionally? Why they fired a well-respected manager and brought in someone who was in over his head? Why they brought in Yarmolenko, who has been thooughly underwhelming, to replace Dembele? What are they doing with the rest of the Dembele money right now? Why did they back their chief scout over the manager and then end up losing the scout anyways? There are lots of questions and no answers from Watzke right now. If he were fired, he'd deserve it.
To be honest, there are a lot of successful managers that are insufferable pricks. Mourinho is the poster child for that. Not every manager is going to be Klopp, who was BFFs with management and had an excellent working relationship with them.
While I'm sure TT was no peach (as MS stated), I think this had a lot to do with factions in the club. It was Sahin and Schmelzer who were the "anonymous" sources always parroting Watzke and trashing TT. Interestingly both Bender and Gundo recently came out supporting Tuchel - with Bender saying he never had any issues with Tuchel and Gundo calling him the best coach he has ever had. Watzke is the common incompetent thread!
You have got to be new to top level football to think TT brought in Rode and Schurrle. That is now how this works. That is not how any of this works. No top level management in charge of millions lets a first year coach dictate purchases, no matter the pedigree of the coach. This has been documented by many journalists. Sure the coach can ask for a player, he can even attend a game to scout a player but not for the likes of Castro, Rode or Toprak but for the likes of Dembele and Neymar. There are so many variables that go into bringing in a player: negotiating and dealing with an agent, parents, the player himself, finances, insurance, logistic, marketing, the media. The coach is busy training the players he has. Jurgen Klopp had ZERO say in Kagawa and Lwandowski. AFAIK, the first player he had a say in bringing in directly was Ciro Immobile and this was 6......SIX years after he was at the club. Please think about why I mentioned Pep and Neymar at Bayern. And Bayern had the cash to sign him. We were faltering before TT and we absolutely suck after TT. During his time we either played exceptional football or we won trophies.....despite losing most of the core of the squad and replacing them with pylons. Money dictates where a football club is placed in the standings. Why are we NOT the 10th best club in Europe? Why are we a perennial exception?
There is more than enough blame to go around between Tuchel (for interfering in Mislintat's work and generally being a colossal pain in the ass), certain players (Sahin/Schmelzer for acting entitled e.g. the Pokal final), bad luck (Reus & Götze's ailments) - but ultimately the buck stops with Watzke, who seems unable to execute clear decisions or manage the relationships of those reporting to him. He kicked the can down the road on a number of issues which led to bad outcomes. Aki should have: Managed the eventual exits of Hummels, Gündogan, Mkhitaryan, (Aubameyang) for more optimal outcomes Told Tuchel to stop throwing shade at Mislintat's transfer targets (Torres, Isak) and refused to pay up for the likes of Schürrle and Rode Controlled the influence of club veterans of marginal sporting value (Sahin, Schmelzer) Resisted the urge to reactively hire Peter Bosz as the antithetical personality to Tuchel The team still has a good inflow of impact transfers, which has been keeping them afloat...but in terms of personnel management and veteran transfers, there's still a great deal to be desired. As a club BVB does so many things well, making all the missed opportunity that much more disappointing.
It's amazing how everybody and their uncle has bought into his age old excuse that other clubs use their money to keep and lure players. His excuse perpetually revolves around Barca, Madrid, the English clubs and when it suits his argument, Bayern. Meanwhile, Napoli and Atletico have kept most of their core together. Juventus, despite struggles, were in the same realm as us back in 2013. 5 years later they have 2 CL finals and constant league triumphs to boast about. Why doesn't Aki use these clubs as an example?
So Mats Hummels is apparently complaining about the lack of competition in the BL. Geez just come back to BVB, would you.
It's hard to argue with any of that, and I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise. But a lot of the accusations many of you are making don't take into considerations basic elements of football. MS, how do you expect them to get Aubameyang to act proffessionally ? Players these days have all the power. Look at Van Dijk and Coutinho, both feigned injuries to force transfer moves. It's near impossible for a club to force a player to act professionally. And the strange thing about the Auba situation, is that dortmund have been willing for some time to let him go, and even then he is behaving like a petulant child. I don't think Yarmolenko signing was all that bad at the time. From a stats perspective, Yarmo had done exceptionally well even if it was in the ukranian league. Dortmund have bought nobodies before, and had them turned into world class players, but you can't expect them to have a 100% record doing this everytime. And the reason they brought in Bosz after the Tuchel firing was because nobody else ws available ... granted, they should have been proactive in sacking him after things turned for the worse. And to have only two players come out in support oF Tuchel out of a whiole team is an indictment of what it must have been like to work for him. i mean just think of the mislintat incident. It's insane to do something like that. What was Tuchel thinking. And to say that management should refuse to buy the players that a manager wants ... when does this ever happen ? You put a player infront of a manager, and he refuses to work with him and insists on so and so. And what, you think management should just ignore this and purchase the player anyways against the wishes of the manager. all managers have final say on who comes into the club. Often times, if a manager does not know enough about the player he will agree to work with him and see where things go. but I think we can all agree thaT Tuchel is not the reasonable type. And if you think that money is a gage for success in football, then what would be the point of playing at all. There are going to be dips for any team, I mean just look at Real. They are behind Valencia who pale in comparison to them in terms of revenue. I think that once Dortmund get rid of the dead wood, and get a decent manager in,
Atletico Madrid is at the same place or level we were at a couple years ago when Klopp was still here. Slash, if you were a fan of Atletico instead you would also have 1001 complaints about how they cannot keep hold of their strikers, fall short in champions league finals or how Simeone makes his defenders play as midfielders. I do not understand the fetishization of Juventus. As I said before, Juventus has the Agnelli family as owners for many decades. We do not have investors and we are not in the same position, they are the Bayern Munich of the Serie A. Dortmund is not the richest and most stable big club in a league where 19 out of 20 clubs have financial problems, rotting stadiums and constantly revolving ownership changes or upheaval. You cannot compare Dortmund to Juventus. They are where they are because in the last ten to fifteen years Milan, Inter, Napoli and the other bigger clubs have been shittier, it is all down to the mismanagement and corruption that is endemic in Italy. Napoli was relegated to the third division, Parma went into administration. Juventus themselves were relegated for match fixing but they had enough wealth and leverage to bounce back immediately. Bayern is in the most similar position to Juventus, in fact the management of Juventus has spoken about learning from Hoeness by picking off the best players of their Serie A rivals. Bayern shrewdly took advantage of the woeful management mistakes of HSV, Wolfsburg, Dortmund, Schalke and Neverkusen over many decades and created a unassailable financial gap in the meantime. Face it, this is about wanting us to be more like Bayern Munich. Our club is trying but after the Bavarians and EPL clubs are done with buying up all the talent in our league, it is slim pickings. I still think we can do better than ending up with scraps like Schürrle, Park Joohoo and Rode though.
As it was states before - TT also bears fault, as do entitled senior players. However there is 1 constant problem in everybody's version - the inept attitude of our management, namely Watzke. The whole Tuchel fiasco and especially the way it was handled just screams of incompetence and internal power struggles. Might I add that we also missed out on players such as KDB and Eriksen, the latter of which was in fact waiting for us to make a move, yet we passed. And I am sorry, but the excuse that we don't have money hasn't been viable for at least 3-4 years now. I would have bought it in 2010, but not in 2018. BVB has had increasing profits for quite some time now. We are certainly in a position to make lucrative bids on the market and offer players good deals. And what does Watzke do? Some of our star players get peanuts all in the sake of his financial stability. So why are hoarding money if we are not going to use it? That strict financial dogma that is being enforced by management is one of the main reasons we keep losing our best players and the person that is enforcing it should be held accountable. The sad reality is that after the CL final we had established ourselves as one of the top clubs in the world but some people in management failed to adapt and are still stuck with their financial stinginess and ''growing club'' mentality. The club exceeded their potential and they failed to live up to the new standard. Right now they are dragging us down to their level. We need a huge overhaul - both in the squad and upper in the club. Even if JG comes, he will be bound for failure should our approach and financial structure stays the same.
Bayern and Juventus are poles apart. They went from competing with the BVBs of this world 5 years ago to competing with the Bayerns in today's football. They doubled their revenue in three years.
That is a disingenuous argument. How have Juventus doubled their revenue? Is it not partly because in recent years they are usually the only Italian team left the latter stages of the Champions League so they get the lion's share of domestic television revenue without having to share with other Serie A clubs? Is that not because other Serie A clubs are too shit to compete in Europe, strengthening Juventus in the process? They can earn as much as 100m from Champions League if they reach the final, like how Bayern profits if no other German club reaches the late stages. Meanwhile Spanish clubs split tv earnings three or four ways because Barcelona Madrid Atletico and other Spanish clubs are so strong in Europe they always make the round of 16.
You answered your own question. If Madrid can pile up an enormous amount of money and future cash flow despite competing on all fronts with Atletico and Barca, so can BVB. And if being the only representative in the CL was enough, shouldn't Bayern, Celtic, PSG and Donetsk be winning CL titles on a regular basis by now?
Madrid are not competing with anyone right now. Atletico use 3rd party financing to purchase players, anD Juve have been a European powerhouse for decades, and are one of the best supported teams in Italy and have had barely any competition from the other large clubs (Inter and Milan), due to poor management. And how can Celtic and Donetsk be winning titles based solely on being the sole representative in europe ? Common Slash ... some of the arguments you make make me wonder. I worry about you
So Arsenal's offer for Auba is at 58m Euro, while BVB demands a higher sum as well as Giroud on loan. I think this would be much preferable to taking him on in a permanent deal.
Haha! That's a good one, coming from him I still don't sympathize with his desire to join Bayern. And so, I don't want him back, despite his talent. I don't want players who put us in a bad position, either by a sudden move (it seems his was) or by a move to Bayern. I'm OK with taking back players if they stayed with us through most of their contract, and/or made it a good a deal for us to leave. That only includes Gundogan at this point, and also (against many of your opinions) Dembele, although don't worry he won't be coming back, as he's destined for much more than we can offer. But to be fair, BVB is as responsible as him for this lack of competition.
I sometimes have no clue why Arsenal do what they do. Here you have a player that they want and are ready to buy. Yet BVB wants 60 for him and Arsenal offer....... 58M, thus starting to drag the whole thing. They mean to tell me that they can spare 58M but not 2 more? I call bull. That whole penny-pinching mentality has been coming around to bite them in the a**. As for Giroud - far from ideal, given the circumstances, but unless we cannot sign Modeste, then probably it is better than nothing and having to rely solely on Isak, or God forbid Schurrle..
I heard Schuerrle might go on loan to Newcastle or West Brom. But it is porb just be a rumor - don't ask me from where.
Dortmund is coming to the USA on a tour this summer and are playing 3 games: 1st: LAFC 2nd: Nashville against European competition 3rd: Charlotte against European competition.