In April of this year, Borussia Monchengladbach’s sporting director Max Eberl did something Bundesliga sporting directors rarely do: he sacked a coach who was getting good results and was well-liked in the dressing room.
Dieter Hecking, an experienced operator in the top flight, had guided the club from the Lower Rhine region close to the Champions League spots in his second full season in charge. But Eberl and the board had decided that they needed a change irrespective of the outcome of the campaign. Hecking saw out the season to finish in fifth spot but was then forced to make way for his successor. Gladbach didn’t just want someone new and more exciting in the much-hyped RB Salzburg coach Marco Rose. They wanted to really go for it.
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“Saying goodbye to Hecking was a very difficult decision,” a senior club official tells The Athletic. “He had done a decent job and had helped us finish among the top nine for eight consecutive years, a degree of consistency that only Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund had managed in the same space of time. But in order to make the next step, we felt that the controlled, possession-based football of Hecking and (his predecessor) Lucien Favre needed to evolve.” Rose, an alumni of the Red Bull football school of high-tempo pressing and transition, was entrusted to oversee that ambitious transformation.
Ten days before the winter break, results have already exceeded expectations. Borussia have been top of the league for most of the season and have emerged as legitimate contenders to win a first championship since the club’s heyday in the mid-1970s, when side-burned, long-haired superstars such as Gunter Netzer, Berti Vogts and Jupp Heynckes roamed the Bokelberg ground.
Thanks to their glorious history, the excitement that has greeted their thrilling run is being felt far beyond their small home town of 255,000 people. Gladbach are one of the few sides with fans all over Germany and are almost universally popular with neutrals, too; people think of them as the epitome of nostalgic glamour and pre-modern unpretentiousness.
Until this decade, however, their story was that of a faded force. As commercial pressures mounted in the wake of football’s development into an entertainment product, the club found itself unable to keep up with sides from bigger, economically more powerful cities. The decline led to their first-ever relegation in 1999.
Their turnover was a measly €16 million then. Bankruptcy loomed. Following promotion in 2001, they went down once more in 2007 but by then, something of quiet renaissance was under way. Under chairman Rolf Konigs, who had been elected in 2004, Borussia had managed to build a state-of-the art stadium on the outskirts of town, the Borussia-Park, and invested in a new academy. Producing their own players was rightly seen as the only way to compete with the league’s wealthier sides.
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Things could have easily taken a turn for the worse, however. In 2011, Borussia were once more threatened with the drop. A powerful group of rebels, including former midfielder Stefan Effenberg and club icon Vogts, were trying to wrest control of the board from Konigs. But the club’s members voted against the plotters and under-fire sporting director Eberl struck gold: newly-hired Favre saved the team from a third relegation and led them into Europe the very next season. In 2014-15, they finished third, qualifying for the Champions League group stage for the first time.
In purely financial terms, there’s still a lot of ground to be made up. Last year’s turnover of €173 million is only a fraction of the sums Bayern Munich (€657 million) and Borussia Dortmund (€489 million) raked in. There are no investors with deep pockets, nor strategic partners or minority shareholders backing the 100 per cent member-owned club. All money is self-generated from the proceeds of TV rights, sporting success and player sales, and 10 per cent of income is put aside for infrastructure projects such as the recently opened €35 million club museum and hotel next to the stadium.
“It’s impossible for us to pump €50 or €60 million (net) into the team each year, as Bayern or Dortmund can do,” Eberl said in the summer. “I can only invest money we make from European football.” The most they have ever spent on a player was €23 million on French striker Alassane Plea, who arrived from OGC Nice in 2018.
Mid-table resources on one hand and the strong need for top-of-the-table finishes on the other left Borussia with a choice. They could either continue on their course under the solid if unspectacular Hecking or hire a prodigious young manager who might overperform with the help of cutting edge tactics and his inspirational charisma. They chose the latter.
Rose, 43, arrived with a football team-sized collection of assistant coaches. He made Borussia play higher up the pitch and go after the ball in systematic fashion without jettisoning their cultured passing game. Rose has been fortunate to have been exposed to the three most influential coaches in Germany this century. At Mainz, he was a journeyman player in a journeyman’s Bundesliga 2 team who were catapulted to the top flight thanks to Jurgen Klopp’s innovative pressing game. Later on, he worked with the more possession and position-focussed Thomas Tuchel at the same club before becoming a youth coach at RB Leipzig under the auspices of Ralf Rangnick. The result of all these influences is a hybrid style that cannot easily be labelled but plays precisely to the strength of Borussia’s young, pacy and physically strong front line that Eberl has skilfully assembled.
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Many Bundesliga teams play or attempt to play a similar game, truth be told. What differentiates Rose aren’t so much his ideas as the captivating way he manages to get them across. “From the moment he turned up here, he has had this remarkable ability to communicate complex ideas in a very simple and effective idea,” the Borussia official says. “He gets people. And he gets into their heads. Rhetorically, he’s outstanding. Having listened to his team talks once or twice, I was eager to go out myself and play.” Comparisons are inevitable: Mainz sporting director Christian Heidel recalled feeling the same thing after hearing Klopp address the players for the first time in 2001.
Like his former manager, Rose is a devout Christian guided by strong moral principles. Whether he will one day be similarly revered as a tracksuited miracle-worker will become clearer in the fullness of time. But for the moment, he certainly has Gladbach living the dream, the specifically German football dream of self-determined, 100 per cent organic growth, that is.
Thanks to him and the club’s knack of getting key decisions right, Borussia have become competitive and exciting again. It’s no exaggeration to say that millions will be rooting for them to repeat their 1970s heroics and break Bayern’s dominance. Even if it’s just for one season.
(Photo: Marius Becker/picture alliance via Getty Images)
