One of the jokes doing the rounds on social media described the DFB-Pokal final as a meeting between one ultra-commercial football corporation… and RB Leipzig.
But while it’s true that Borussia Dortmund’s “Echte Liebe” (“real love”) strapline sometimes smacks of a cynical marketing ploy, it also contains a kernel of truth, like all good advertising slogans. The love was certainly real in the German capital on Thursday night.
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There were jubilations and there were tears of joy. Veteran Lukasz Piszczek, nicknamed “Piszczu”, was in bits as his team-mates were giving him the bumps and then broke down again in a TV interview as he spoke of “a dream coming true: getting back into the first XI for one final time and winning a trophy”.
The 35-year-old put on the shirt of his full-back colleague and another one of the club’s recent cult heroes Marcel Schmelzer, who is currently sidelined through injury. “There are no words for what Piszczu has done for the club,” said caretaker coach Edin Terzic of the Polish defender, who will leave the club after 11 seasons at Signal Iduna Park.
Terzic, too, was close to crying. He first started working for BVB as a scout and youth coach in 2010 and has long been an avid supporter. There’s a photo of him in the stands during Dortmund’s 5-2 triumph over Bayern Munich in the 2012 cup final. Nine years later, he came back to guide the team to another win in the competition.
Terzic preferred to talk about others — he singled out goalkeeper Roman Burki, who had come back in from the cold after Marvin Hitz had picked up an injury a week before — but everyone could see just how much of an impact he has made since taking over in December. “The team were half dead then”, said Dortmund’s chief executive Hans-Joachim Watzke.
Now, thanks to Terzic finding the right words in the dressing room and a less passive tactical approach, they’re not just back among the living but thriving. A sixth consecutive win (4-1 at Mainz) in the league and a bit of help from arch-rivals Schalke, who beat Eintracht Frankfurt 4-3, secured Champions League qualification for Dortmund on Sunday. Watzke estimated, rather conservatively, that the club would be €30 million better off thanks to finishing at least fourth.
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Dortmund have managed to save their season and quite possibly the next one, too. There was never going to be a wholesale clear-out of top players, but Champions League football will make it a lot easier for budding superstar striker Erling Haaland to stick around for another campaign and also enable the club to address some long-standing problems within the squad composition.
The only concern is that Terzic has done better than anticipated and incoming coach Marco Rose (currently eighth in the table with Borussia Monchengladbach) a little worse. It could make for an uneasy dynamic in July when Terzic is supposed to step into the background again and serve as one of Rose’s assistants.
Players and staff would love the continuity of Terzic being a part of the new manager’s set-up but there’s a school thought within the club that it might be better for the 38-year-old to gather experience as a first-team coach elsewhere and then come back as Rose’s successor in a few years. Eintracht Frankfurt are still without a manager for next season, as are, in all likelihood, Bayer Leverkusen. (And Tottenham Hotspur and Crystal Palace, of course — Terzic, who was Slaven Bilic’s assistant at West Ham a few years ago, speaks excellent English.)
Whatever Terzic decides, Dortmund can congratulate themselves for getting a difficult decision right — at last. They agonised over the dismissal of Lucien Favre for the best part of 18 months. Officials had sensed that the Swiss coach’s tactical disposition and impersonal management style wasn’t the right fit early on, yet were too afraid to let him go for fear of appointing the wrong man.
Terzic turned out to be a black and yellow mini-version of Hansi Flick, as they had hoped, but there should be a wider lesson here. If Dortmund are to close the gap between their own potential and results — let alone that which exists between them and Bayern — they have to become a club that continues to look after their own (a la Piszczek) and foster a special bond without turning a blind eye to uncomfortable truths in the process.
They have to be a lot more ruthless in their decision-making; less afraid to come across as cruel, even at the risk of upsetting the marketing men along the way. It’s tough love that’s needed in Westphalia, not the “real” one.
(Photo: Martin Rose/Getty Images)
