Like I posted earlier in this thread, it seems the so called squad overhaul is replacing deadwood with deadwood. To make matters worse, stupid local fans genuinely believe we're going to challenge for trophies with a coach that has never challenged for league titles and has been humiliated in European tournaments, plus the addition of midtable club level footballers. As for Bale, please Slash, like we stand a chance.
Way to many of you have far too large expectations of Dortmund and their hierarchy in European football. This "big club" mentality that many bring up is not applicable to Dortmund. During the mid to late 90's was the time BVB acted like a big club splashing money on the Amoroso's of the world but that proved unsustainable as it almost led to the destruction of the club. The success brought upon under Klopp can be categorized as "overachieving" as all the "world class" players were young talents who were too good/dominating for their league and needed a chance at a higher level to break through like a Lewandowski and Gundogan. Reus was really the only purchase that could be categorized as a "star" player but his situation is more comparable to Timo Werner's currently and if you think you can get a Timo Werner for the equivalent of 17m today then you must be mad. Dortmund is no "big club" but rather a Tier 2 club in the 10-20 range of European football along the likes of Tottenham, Napoli, etc. With the financial situation stabilized, Dortmund should once more focus on getting the young and hungry up-and-commers while being able to offer them higher wages once time comes to resign instead of wasting the money on transfer fees for older veterans with next to no prospects.
The 2nd best team in Germany with 80k fans every week should have bigger aspirations. Your attitude is the cowardly attitude that holds the club back; accepting mediocrity. Rubbish signings actually add up. The money and wages spent on Rode and Castro could have brought in a decent midifeld. The money spent of Schurrle and Toprak could have brought in a player of quality. There are so many dead weight signings because the club had low ambition. Klopp has the right attitude at Liverpool. He makes do with average players until he can bring in the players he believes will make a difference. He obviously has more money than Liverpool, but he could have bought say Hart and Keane, but he waited and bought VDV. No fan is asking the club to go and buy Ronaldo and Bale. It's a strawman to suggest such rubbish. We want the club to buy quality players, that aren't always expensive. Instead of trying to buy Toprak, they should have gone for Tah. I applaud the Akanji signing even if it doesn't work out, because he is the right type of signing. Paying 20 million for a decent central midfielder is poor business. These are examplaes of good BVB signings whether they work out or not. Good Philipp Dembele Sancho Akanji Zagadou Raphael Dahoud Gotze Bad Toprak Castro Schurrle Kagawa Sahin Ramos Rode Yarmolenko was last minute, because Dembele shocked the club with his behaviour, but Delaney is much closer to the bad signing as was Toljan. The good signings are talented young players with ability to become world class. The bad signings are average, overpaid average players who are on the decline and add little to the team.
It is usually the people who started following Dortmund during Klopp's overachieving years that unrealistically expect Dortmund club to compete for player signings with Chelsea, Bayern Munich, Manchester United and Juventus. Even Wolfsburg plastics do not think that way after they won the Bundesliga. To those fans, they started following when we were Bundesliga champion, runner up or champions league finalist, so recent seasons feel unsatisfying since they expect the club to replicate Klopp's successful years and see anything less as being gross incompetence of Dortmund's club officials. Maybe other clubs have richer owners but club officials elsewhere are just as incompetent as ours if not worse. The irony of seeing a Crystal Palace fan rage about how badly Dortmund is managed. Dortmund sold a teenager for 9 figures and mugged off Celta into paying us a profitable sum for an imbecile like Mor. It should be accepted that Dortmund struck jackpot with Klopp who is so good at polishing turds and taking average footballers to champions league finals, he did it twice. Now that Klopp is gone our squad veterans are back to being their average selves, many of them do not even get called up to play for their national team. It is a good thing we do not fight to stay up like Wolfsburg and Stuttgart. In 2018 we reach champions league regularly and have enough money to sell deadweight and do a big squad overhaul. 100% of fans would have taken this kind of progress in ten years before Klopp arrived in Dortmund in 2008.
My attitude is simply based on reality no matter how "cowardly" you want it to be. When Dortmund, 2nd biggest BL club, has revenues half of the EPL's 2nd biggest club and is more comparable to the mid-tier EPL clubs then splurging 70M on Fekir or 50M on a Fred is not sustainable no matter how you look at it. I agree with you that signings such as Delaney are not the way to go but, like I previously said, signings of young up-and-commers such as Akanji are the most sustainable and realistic way to go. The players we should be targeting is Pavard and Ascacibar but with today's transfer market we would have to splash a 100M on those two players and Dortmund is not in a position to do that as there are too many holes to plug.
Recognizing that we are not on Bayern's level and that the financial gap is widening doesn't mean that one has no ambitions or that this realization is the reason to go for uninspiring signings. I also think there is a little disconnect between fans who were supporters from a very young age and who grew up in that environment and those from abroad. Success isn't everything. Concerning the transfers, Toprak and Castro shouldn't have been bought. Castro was a relatively cheap signing when we didn't make the CL. But they seem like players to get for a few years until better solutions could be found for the quality players we lost (Hummels, Gündogan). They didn't work out, of course, as they weren't even achieving the level they had at Leverkusen. We need to get rid of players that don't pull their weight anymore but the club has shown that they are willing to invest. It's just that the big money transfers of the last years didn't work out so far and gave a way worse return of investment than the young talents. I also fear there are players who rather ride the bench than look for another club. I think Durm would want to leave but he has nothing to show for for the last two seasons. I don't see where a big overhaul should come from.
I'm not saying BVB should go all out and spend 100m+ on superstar footballers, but for crying out loud, this club has a EUROPEAN CUP in its trophy cabinet and came close to adding a second one. Sure, we might lack the obscene financial resources of Manchester City and PSG, but that doesn't mean that the money should be wasted on garbage like Castro, Rode and Toprak. We should be going after promising youth from within Germany, as they would be more willing to commit to the club longterm, because the whole Dembélé ordeal taught me foreign youths perceive BVB as a stepping stone club and are thus less likely to commit longterm since their heads are set on Real Madrid, Barcelona or some Premier League club willing to shower them in cash. Our reinforcements so far are players in their mid-20s who have spent the last few years of their careers toiling in the lower half of the Bundesliga table trying to keep their previous clubs afloat. That is honestly not kind of experience that will help us challenge for trophies. It's a real shame we passed on Timo Werner when he was at Stuttgart, as he is now well beyond our reach.
That is and should be a realistic goal for the club. Players like Diallo and Danso should be targets for the CB positions to replace Toprak and Ascacibar to be the workhorse DM who is an aggressive ball-winner that this team desperately needs instead of wasting 20M on Delaney.
Oh yes now let's hate on those fans who just joined us 7 years ago. Cuz they are the erfolgsfans. After all they can't wait to go support Barca and Real or perhaps even PSG since then, right? Financially, the numbers don't add up. Liverpool have spent the Barcelona money on Fekir, Fabinho and Keita. We've spent the Barcelona money on Delaney and Yarmolenko. Our squad wages to revenue is at a healthy ratio in the low 30%. It's not like having a 60% wage ratio is bad because if you're making 700M in turnover, there's only so much you can spend on football operations, admin and marketing. Football was not what it was 18 years ago. Our clubs finances and outlook are not the same. Off the pitch we are the 12th biggest club in the world. On the pitch, we are 17th. That's a sign of poor management. Even off the pitch we were 10th until Juventus left us in the dust and Spurs overtook us. Hard to blame Thomas Treß and Carsten Cramer when Watke is the incompetent in chief.
Slash is right. Just because I became a fan during the successful league victory runs of 2011-12 doesn't mean I'm ditching the club because of the recent trophyless seasons. No other football club has made me feel joy like BVB does. Right now I am angry at the spinelessness of local BVB fans who are currently celebrating the signing of Delaney like he's some sort of world class midfielder in the mold of Emmanuel Petit. No wonder Watzke's position is safe, seeing as the local fanbase is every bit as unambitious as he is.
I am obviously an Erfolgsfan by the way. I became a fan in '97. Got disillusioned for awhile and then enjoyed 2002 like crazy. We have had horrible management before and Watzke smells a lot like the horrible management from back then, albeit a different kind.
We have to factor in tax and agent fees. Slash you have been a much longer football supporter than me so it should not come as a surprise that getting 120 million for Dembele does not mean we have 120 million to spend. We have to factor in Klopp's appeal to players and agents who want to increase the value of their player. He can make bad players look good and good players look world class, and he reach 2 champions league finals, which agent or player in the world would reject that? Slash, if not paying 170 million for Keita, Fekir and Fabinho means our club is run by idiots, try to make an extraordinary pitch to us how you will convince them to come and play for Bosz, Stoger and Favre for less weekly pay than at Liverpool? Do those players even suit what Favre wants to do tactically? It comes across as nonsensical ramblings because you do not factor in how much stupid money English football has. Like hearing a teenage boy whine to his parents about how life sucks because his classmate's millionaire father has a bigger inheritance and is more competent in making money and buys the latest Iphone and gadgets for their high tech house, so he blames his shitty grades on the lack of high tech gadgets. You realize it is possible to be a successful club without spending 170 million on Fabinho, Keita and Fekir? If you do not realize this, save yourself the agony and switch to supporting Bayern Munich or a Premier League giant like Chelsea and Liverpool. The comparison and negativity will never end. If you support Juventus, you will rage about being European runners up again and again, lagging behind Bayern Munich, Barcelona and Real Madrid in Europe and not having as much money as England. If you support Tottenham, you will rage about how your club is a laughing stock for not winning anything of note for half a century. How have they overtaken Dortmund, in terms of money? That is because Tottenham play in the Premier League and they sell all their best players like us, so you will no doubt outraged by that and the lack of anything but dust in the trophy cabinet. If you support Liverpool, you will talk non stop about how Liverpool used to be the most successful in England and rage about not winning the league for many decades and getting overtaken by Man U, Man C and other English clubs in money and trophies. If you support any Bundesliga club other than Dortmund and Bayern, you will rage about how they cannot play two good seasons in a row and how all the management are a bunch of pussy five year olds who sell all their best players. At some point you have to realize there are things we cannot change - We are a Bundesliga club so we will have less tv cash than Premier League clubs and the league has rules that stop rich investors from throwing unlimited money into the club, like Man U, Chelsea, Juventus and Liverpool. - We are located in Dortmund which is like the armpit of Germany, same as Schalke. No player who has no business to do with BVB wants to live there ok? We cannot migrate the club to Munich, Madrid, Milan or Manchester and raise the clubs appeal. But we are the number one biggest club in the region and that attracts many people to support Dortmund even if they are not from the local area. It would be different if we are the second or third biggest club in Berlin or Munich. - We are lucky to have one of the biggest stadiums in Europe which makes people think of us as a big club, and even our fans think the stadium makes Dortmund a bigger club and deserving of more success than if we had a 50000 seater like other German clubs . We did not have to pay a ransom to build it and it was subsidized by taxpayer money, but the club makes enough money to expand the stadium every few seasons. There is a cheesy quote about success which can apply to Dortmund. Don't be better than your contemporaries or predecessors, just try to be better than yourself. The club has ********ed up in the past and Watzke handled the Tuchel situation badly because he is a coaching talent who had Klopp level appeal to players, all we can do now is to work to be better than we were last season. I cannot say Delaney will be world class, but there is no point in writing him off immediately but at the same time talking up other club's new signings like those players will be a 100% confirmed success. Is there a name for this kind of logical fallacy? In the same way teenagers are prone to overly exaggerating their own flaws and seeing only negativity while imagining that their peers lead 100% instagram worthy, perfect lives.
Nobody has aksed for Fekir so please stop with these false arguments and please get your facts right. For a long time Dortmund had equal or greater revenue than the likes of Tottenham and Liverpool. Even last year, Tottenham only had £20 million more. Tottenham came 3rd in the Premier League and have come 2nd twice in the last 5 years. Dortmund also have the huge benefit of not having to pay the Premier League wages or English tax on players. Liverpool climbed their way to the top, by prudent management. Dortmund at the moment are struggling to compete with Hoffenheim, a club with a fraction of the budget. There are times and moments to splash out big. I have actually rarely advocated Dortmund make big name signings. The only time where Dortmund should have gone and spent big is after 2013. They needed to spend big and buy top quality to replace Lewandowski (who they should have sold) and Gotze. I said the club should have gone big for Ozil and Higuain. It was a brief period where it was worth the gamble. As for funds, I think Pulisic should be sold to make signings like Akanji. I have to be honest I have not seen enough of Stuttgart to judge Pavard and Ascacibar, but they seem to be the right types of signings. My targets for Dortmund have nearly always been German and easily available from other clubs the likes. This year I have actually watched less Bundesliga football than usual, but I will give you a list of players I have wanted: Brandt (before Leverkusen, but not needed now), Goretzka, Meyer, Sane (as soon as he broke out), Dahoud, Geis, Werner (at Stuttgart, but possible this summer), Rudiger ( at Stuttgart and when injured at Roma) Timo Horn Jonathan Tah (at Hamburg and now) Henrichs Zouma Balotelli Lukaku (previously at Everton) Every single one of those signigns were/are realistic. At the moment I advocate doing everything possible to sign Werner, because it's a short window where there is no competition for his signature. However, Werner apart I want a RB ----a realistic talented young player like Henrichs a CB ---a realistic talented one like Zouma or Tah, but have not seen enough of Diallo and Pavard a CM----not Delaney for 20 million euros. Someone on a free like Bayern did with Rudy Sell Pulisic to fund those deals, possibly Yarmolenko and any other dead weight you can to fund those deals. If necessary swap Raphael to PSG in return for Rodriguez from Milan. This will give extra funds too. RB- 25 million Euros CB--30 million Euros CM ---NOT 20 million Euros, money wasted, not a necessary first team signing around 10 million Euros for a bench player CF-----60-70 million Eutos Overall spending around 130 million Euros, a huge outlay. A lot to spend. Try and bring in 80 million from selling Pulisic, Sokratis, possibly Yarmolenko and other dead weight. Not impossible, not stupidly realistic and would leave the club in a much better and stronger squad.
I actually started following/supporting Dortmund after 97, because they 1. Had a British player 2. Beat Manchester United. I first noticed them, because they had Moller, who I hated after 96 and wanted his club to fail really badly. So I watched Dortmund in the CL hoping they would lose every game. It's a straw man argument to think people are asking for Ronaldo and Bale. Nobody is. These were terrible signings and had no plus side. It was made worse, that Leverkusen were signing the likes of Brandt and Tah, players we should have gottten instead. The club also fails to realise when it is time to sell a player. I was a huge fan of Gundogan, but he treated the club terribly and should have been sold much earlier. Mkhitaryan should have been sold for Brandt after his dismal first few couples of seasons. That's because the big money signings were terrible decisions. They were buying the likes of Schurrle for stupid amounts of money. Investing in the likes of Tah etc are good signings and in the worst case scenario a large percentage of the fee can be regained by selling them on to other Bundesliga clubs. Also a sign of poor scouting and the bad personalities at the club. I wouldn't want anyone at the club prepared to ride out their contract and not play. I have tremendous respect for Sven, wanting to play football and going to Leverkusen. I have a lot of respect for Hofmann too. The likes of Sahin, with their fake love of the club don't appeal to me. He left the club the moment he could, he failed everywhere and then came back. He is happy to get his pay check and not play. Also I think Mor was an example of a good signing, yes it didn't work out, but we got a decent fee back.
Well, what made the Castro and Toprak signings questionable for me was that even Leverkusen had moved on from them by the time we got them. That should have been a clear signal. I don't think anyone wanted to attack recent fans or Erfolgsfans. By all measures, I'm a Erfolgsfan myself. I started to follow them just before their titles in the 90s but when they were already good. Reaching the top and going through meh and even very ugly years, I went from "Maybe we'll catch Bayern" to "I'm ok with winning the title every 10 years just like everyone else except Bayern in the BL would be". And I know how terrible that sounds after Klopp and our financial situation nowadays. I just think that those who only know the football we played under Klopp and Tuchel have different expectations than those who went through the shitty years as well.
You rambled on without understanding the core of what I said. But you did answer your own question in the end. We aren't better than ourselves. We've been getting worse every year.
Hello, I am a new member of this group from Denmark. I have been following Delaney from the days were he started playing at FCK. He is a slow starter playing average the first season and then rise to captain the following. That’s his track record from youth days and he almost did the same when he was promoted to senior. I think that he fits perfect into the defensive midfield at Dortmund. He works very hard and would release some of the offensive players defensive work…and he will properly also score 4-8 goals every season. He had played along former Stuttgart player William Kvist in FCK (and on the national team) and they match each other perfectly. Kvist defending and calm, Delaney with hard working rage. He and Weigl would fit perfect into a 4-2-3-1 releasing the full offensive potential for the team. I really can’t see a better match for the value. He will be the future captain in 1-2 seasons.
According to Bild, Rode ears 6M/year, Castro ears 5M/year, and Durm 3.5M/year....good luck clearing those off the books.
RevierSport reports that Castro, Durm, Rode, Sahin, Schürrle and Yarmolenko are free to leave BVB this summer, but neither are willing to. It's a real shame Schürrle didn't work out for us, because I love him to bits, and Durm showed a lot of promise in his debut season, so much so that Jogi made him part of Germany's World Cup winning squad four years ago, however injuries have killed all his potential. Oh well, at least Durm will always have the memory of lifting football's ultimate trophy at the Maracana, and Schürrle has a lifetime pass for assisting Germany's World Cup winning goal. As for the other four, Sahin won't shut up these days about how much he loves the club and the stupid local fanbase eats it up willingly forgetting he ditched BVB without a second thought the moment Real Madrid came knocking. Castro and Rode I have no idea why anyone thought they'd be good additions to the club, with Rode fortunately being permabenched and Castro inexplicably becoming an undisputed starter under three different coaches (if this poor excuse of a footballer is still draining BVB's money next season I hope that at least Favre is immune to his inexplicable charms and permabenches him). Finally there's Yarmolenko, a distinctly average player BVB sought desperately for three years which I find baffling. Like I posted earlier, the club should show some ruthlessness and terminate their contracts. Then, and only then I would know they are being serious about the squad overhaul they've talked about these last few months.
I would add Schmelzer to that list, however I wouldn't mind Yarmo staying for another year as I think he has good attributes and under a better coach could offer more.
Yeah, Schmelzer should also be ditched, but it looks like the club is happy with him despite being obsolete.
Genius, as good as eaglespark's suggestion to sign former Schalker and good players the moment they crawled out of their crib. And which top players can Dortmund hope to sign after we show how contracts are not worth the paper its printed on?
We can't end contracts unilaterally anyways because that is not how contracts work. We can push players to the reserves and isolate them from the team, but if they are stubborn, there isn't much the club can do, they'll still receive their paychecks.
So the sokratis deal with arsenal is done. But will be announced after the world cup, because tax things.