World News – CA – What is a Success?

Borussia Dortmund’s business is winning games and nurturing some of the best young talent in the world. To do both, one sometimes has to endure some mounting pain.

Even after Lucien Favre turned 60, he could still do things with a ball that impressed even some of the best talent in European football just a little.

He could juggle it just as well as any of the budding superstars under his guidance at Borussia Dortmund. He had tricks up his sleeve that some of them hadn’t yet mastered. He was able to take part in a small training game – alongside Erling Haaland and Jadon Sancho and the rest of his team, almost all of whom were less than half his age – and assert himself.

Favre has always been a trainer in the traditional sense. Some managers are characterized as motivators, rhetoricians, and demagogues who push their troops into battle. Others are portrayed as crafty, scheming strategists. Favre is, to some extent, a throwback to the role when it was first conceived: he’s a tech teacher at heart.

His training units – in Dortmund and Nice as well as in Borussia Mönchengladbach and all other stations of his long and subtly successful career as a manager – are regularly interrupted in order to change individual technical details and make minor changes to the place where a foot is planted or how a ball is hit or how a body is shaped to get a pass.

It’s a risky approach for a coach in elite football. While at Real Madrid, Rafael Benítez found that his interventions were similarly not very much welcomed by his star-studded squad. Several players made it clear that they didn’t need anyone to tell them how to play football.

Favre never had this problem in Dortmund. In part, it was because of his own enduring ability. Those tricks in practice games weren’t just evidence of a showman series or a growing nostalgia for his days as a player in his native Switzerland. They were a way to gain respect, a sign to his players that he could teach them something.

Just as important, the tricks were proof of the profile of the Dortmund squad. Favre was sacked this week because a Dortmund club could not stand another season in the Bundesliga title race from Bayern Munich. The idea of ​​a 5-1 home defeat against Stuttgart or a fight for qualification for the Champions League next season could not be accepted with certainty.

Dortmund is, after all, Germany’s other superpower, a club that considers itself to be the second largest in command of the Bundesliga in terms of finances, history and clout. It’s one thing to be overwhelmed by Bayern; It’s something completely different to take a look at the table and also to wind through Bayer Leverkusen, RB Leipzig and Wolfsburg before you find Dortmund.

If Bayern Munich wants to win championships, Dortmund at least demands to fight for them. Under Favre, who has been in charge since 2018, this did not quite happen. As it looked like this season too, another false dawn could turn out, the cutthroat rules governing Europe’s elite clubs were in place and 63-year-old Favre had to leave.

But Dortmund is not like any other club of its size in Europe. Although Favre and sporting director Michael Zorc had brought a lot of experience to the squad over the past few years by recapturing Mats Hummels from Bayern and signing Emre Can and Axel Witsel, it remains a hugely young place.

Haaland and Sancho are perhaps two of the most sought-after players in Europe, but both are only 20 years old and Haaland has not yet completed a full year in one of the continent’s major leagues. Giovanni Reyna has become an important part of the team over a similar period of time, but is only 18 years old.

Jude Bellingham got signed over the summer with a look at a slow induction into the first team to interfere in Favre’s plans almost immediately. He is 17. Youssoufa Moukoko, an incredibly talented striker in the club’s youth teams and already seen as a natural substitute for Haaland, turned 16 just last month.

This is the Dortmund system: to recruit blue-chip talents from all over Europe – and occasionally from afar – and expose them to elite football in both the Bundesliga and the Champions League earlier than possible anywhere else. It is this reputation for trusting and empowering youth that the club highlights in its sales pitch for potential signings.

And it was precisely this approach that made Favre the perfect coach for Dortmund in some ways. For all the obvious talent, these are players who still need some guidance on the finer technical points of the game. Unlike Real Madrid’s squad, they haven’t learned everything they’ll ever need to learn.

They are all in Dortmund to improve and improve themselves so that they can be resold to make the leap to Real Madrid or Barcelona or one of the big houses of the Premier League (or, to the chagrin of Dortmund, to) create Bayern Munich). Favre not only fits in with the Dortmund philosophy, but also with the financial model.

The problem, of course, is that both are a bit at odds with the perception of the club. Dortmund have more than enough quality in their squad to beat Stuttgart at home. For example, the team shouldn’t expect Wolfsburg to lag behind Wolfsburg in the table as it was when they changed coach. Dispensing with Favre by these simple standards was justified.

However, running a high-end graduation school for the next generation of stars in Europe comes at a cost, as is the case in Dortmund. This means the roster has to be constantly in the works as players arrive, thrive and inevitably leave to be replaced by a new prodigy.

It means that the focus must always be on attacks – after all, this is where money must be made – and the style of play must always be low-risk. It means accepting a certain amount of fluctuations in performance, a problem that Bayern almost never have during the season. It means overcoming the bumps in a young player’s road.

Dortmund shouldn’t have a hard time appointing a new manager. This is the club that Jürgen Klopp made the guiding star of the press game. Many of the principles of modern football orthodoxy have not only penetrated Dortmund’s soul, but primarily emanated from here. In that sense, it’s for football in the 2020s what Barcelona was a decade earlier: the ideological home of the current iteration of the game.

So there are an abundance of candidates who share the Dortmund principles, who play football that fit well into their traditions and are tempted by their prestige. Mönchengladbach’s Marco Rose is the early favorite and has long been celebrated by Klopp as the bearer of his flame. But there are others: Erik ten Hag, the mastermind of the Ajax resurgence; Ralph Hasenhüttl, who shines in Southampton; and the many other alumni of the Red Bull School of Coaching, from Adi Hütter to Jesse Marsch.

Most would jump at the task. Dortmund offers the opportunity to work with a wonderfully talented squad, to shape young players according to their image and to create a legacy for themselves. And as both Klopp and Thomas Tuchel have shown in recent years, his profile and potential is such that it can be a stepping stone for a coach’s own ambition.

Regardless of which new manager takes the role, they must overcome the contradiction at the heart of the club’s identity. Is Borussia Dortmund the ultimate goal of winning the Bundesliga and claiming a second Champions League crown? Or is success judged not on the field but on the transfer market? Can they ever really walk together?

Dortmund is of course an appealing job. But, as all Klopp’s successors have found, that doesn’t make it easy.

José Mourinho grabbed Jürgen Klopp by the arm, pulled him close and delivered the leash. In Anfield on Wednesday evening, the Tottenham manager told his counterpart in Liverpool that the better team had lost. Only the width of a post had denied Spurs a win he deserved. Liverpool was lucky.

In a way, in a year of such uncertainty, there’s something comforting when an old standard is raised: Mourinho spent much of 2020 being very personable on Instagram, but it’s comforting to know he’s deep inside is has not changed. He’s still the relapsed fire starter he always was.

That does not mean, however, that his claim should be rejected. Liverpool’s 2-1 win was a reminder that there are many ways to read a game and – too often forgotten – it is possible all of them are right.

Mourinho certainly had a case: Spurs created four « big chances » – a measure used by Opta, the data provider, to describe situations where a team could reasonably expect a goal more than half the time could. Heung-Min Son scored one; Harry Kane and Steven Bergwijn missed the others. Liverpool, on the other hand, did not create any.

The Expected Goals metric told almost the same story: Spurs won that, too. Mourinho’s team went to Anfield with a plan and found it worked, save for an unpredictable finish – one of those football uncertainties that can never be completely controlled. Mourinho wasn’t quick to play with the facts.

But neither did Klopp when he predictably disagreed. Liverpool dominated the ball. It dictated the game for long stretches of the game. It had more shots. There were countless other ways to take pictures.

Expected goals are a valuable statistic, but basically they don’t tell the full story of a game (and aren’t designed to do so). For example, it doesn’t capture the ups and downs of pressure, how the stream of possibilities shifts between teams. Not every attack ends in a shot, but that doesn’t make all of those attacks worthless from which to judge a team’s performance. (There are metrics such as. B.. unexpected goals that measure this. )

Liverpool won this country mile competition. For much of the game, it felt like Liverpool were the side on the verge of breakthrough. Spores weren’t attached to it, but neither was their threat constant. So Klopp’s denial was not rooted in fantasy either. The better team lost. But the better team also won. It depends how you read it. And none of these readings are invalid.

It’s really remarkable how complicated football can make even the simplest of things. Introducing a rule that allows players suspected of having head injuries to be removed from the game for the sake of comfort shouldn’t be a particularly complicated process. It’s the sensible thing. It’s strange, if anything, that the rule doesn’t exist yet.

And yet we are here. The body that oversees the rules of the game – always capitalize; People get very funny if you don’t – mandated an experiment that allowed two concussion substitute players per team per game. The Premier League confirmed on Thursday that it would try the idea.

But there are still so many questions. Why two? Why not as many as you need? It’s unlikely there will be more than one in a game, but you never know, do you? Why limit it? And, more urgently, why, on behalf of Santa Claus and all of his gig economy elves, has the Premier League felt the need to add a clause that would allow the opposing team to make changes even if a concussion replacement is in a game entry? p>

What are we saying here? That we have to assume that teams will try to use this perfectly logical and absolutely straightforward health measure for their own purposes? That players with fake head injuries fall over to gain an advantage? Do the leaders who made this decision have so little trust in one another and in themselves that even the wellbeing of the players cannot be left to chance?

You may remember Vincent Tjeng’s question last week when you wondered if soccer is baseball’s Wins Above Replacement metric, which I don’t fully understand but is basically a number , which is used to judge the likelihood of a team being more likely to win Player X than the average player in their position.

Well, Vincent, the crush has found you an answer. A couple of club executives have reached out to say they have something along these lines, but it’s all proprietary so they won’t tell you exactly what it is. Many Thanks. They take into account various performance metrics, position, time on the field and certain attributes, and give a general idea of ​​the impact players have on their team.

There is one possible publicly available candidate that some of you, including Avi Rajendra-Nicolucci and Brandon Conner, have suggested: G that sounds like something you add to Chrome, but actually developed one from American Soccer Analysis Metric is.

That’s all for this week. You will have noticed that next Friday is Christmas Day, which means that next Thursday, when we normally prepare this newsletter, will be Christmas Eve. We were considering taking a week off, but instead of skipping a newsletter, we instead have something up our sleeves to say thank you for reading this weird, short, yet somehow endless year. (Note: it has no monetary value. ) So if you got used to reading the newsletter online every week, this is the day you may finally break down and want to subscribe to it.

Borussia Dortmund, 1. FC Union Berlin, Bundesliga