Borussia Dortmund was described in quite a few doomsday scenarios at the end of last season.
Pundits didn’t shy away from predicting the team’s demise and of football vultures tearing the roster apart. Despite manager Jürgen Klopp assuring fans the team wouldn’t crumble, some continued to carry a lingering sense of unease.
"I can guarantee that everything will be fine in the end. We are building a new team, a new pressing machine," Klopp said.
What others called a breakup, Klopp viewed as change. His vision still stands. The team is a "new pressing machine" that entered the history books last week, becoming the 13th side in history to win its first five matches of the Bundesliga campaign.
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Sitting at 15 points, no other Dortmund side has ever accumulated more than 12 points in five games at the start of a season. Offensively, Dortmund is also the highest scoring side in the Bundesliga with 15 goals and has only been breached four times. To put those numbers into further perspective, around this time last season, Dortmund had only managed two wins and conceded eight goals.
Even the loss of Mario Götze to rivals Bayern Munich is forgotten now. At the time it felt like a dagger through the heart, but new additions Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang have more than filled that void.
The main lessons Klopp learned from last season is the importance of depth and rotation, as well as the need for stronger defensive performances.
The distribution of goals in attack among Robert Lewandowski, Aubameyang, Mkhitaryan, Marco Reus and Jakub Blaszczykowski has certainly given Dortmund an improved unpredictability and versatility up front. The newcomers have also allowed Klopp to rotate and rest players, unlike last season when his thin squad was routinely exhausted while competing in three competitions.
With five goals to his credit, Aubameyang is currently the Bundesliga’s joint top scorer. Although he’s comfortable playing on either side, as well as centrally, Aubameyang tends to thrive on the right, having scored all of his league goals from that flank so far.
Up front the options are more varied this season. There’s the trio of Reus-Mkhitaryan-Aubameyang, Reus-Mkhitaryan- Blaszczykowski and Blaszczykowski-Mkhitaryan-Aubameyang, just to name a few combinations. Klopp even used Ilkay Gundogan (before his injury) as a number ten behind Lewandowski in the season opener.
Although the team is smoothing out a few bumps, signs of players still adjusting are clear from their recent match against Werder Bremen, when they outshot their opponents 32-7, yet only managed to score one goal.
It’s also important to remember the last two times Dortmund won domestic titles, they played a much better defensive game, only conceding 25 or fewer goals. Last season, however, opponents netted 42 goals against them – that’s two less than 13th placed Mainz and 24 more than champions Bayern Munich.
The discrepancy forced Klopp to admit his team couldn’t afford to lose points against sides it should have easily defeated. It wasn’t against Bayern, for example, where they dropped important points (both meetings ended in a draw), but to teams such as Hoffenheim and Hamburg.
While the Ruhr club still has weaknesses in the back four, defensive reinforcement came when they signed centre back Sokratis Papastathopoulos from Werder Bremen after losing Felipe Santana to Schalke 04. The Greek international can also play on the right and gives the club improved depth. Although Lukasz Piszcek’s absence is noticeable, Kevin Grosskreutz has done a decent job at the right back position.
Then there are centre backs Neven Subotic and Mats Hummels, who at their best are tough to break, but continue to commit easily avoidable blunders. This also applies to left back Marcel Schmelzer. Silly mistakes can easily cost them in the Champions League where the slightest errors often have devastating consequences. If teams such as Eintracht Braunschweig and Hamburg can score against them with such ease, then Napoli, Arsenal and Marseille will score twofold if Dortmund isn’t careful.
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They had to learn this the hard way in a 2-1 loss to Napoli in their opening Champions League group stage match on Wednesday. It was a messy performance with the team committing uncharacteristic mistakes and overall lacking discipline. Klopp too fell victim to his emotions and was ejected after lashing out at the fourth official. But he did address his outburst after the game and was very self critical.
"I apologized to the official. My conduct was wrong. It was stupid… My emotionality has many positive aspects and sometimes negative," Klopp admitted.
Despite the loss, there are still five more group stage matches to go. The team’s fighting spirit near the end of the game in Naples was encouraging. If there’s one thing Klopp is good at, it is rebuilding and reorganizing his side. But eliminating mistakes are, of course, vital to that plan.
All things considered, Dortmund is continuing to build on last season. Even the precarious Lewandowski situation has subsided, as the Polish striker was handed a pay rise. And just last week the club extended German under-21 Jonas Hoffmann’s contract to 2018. The 21-year old came on as a substitute against Eintracht Braunschweig and within minutes scored his first goal. He also provided two assists against SV Wilhelmshaven in the DFB Pokal first round.
Hoffmann and Marvin Ducksch (a 19-year-old product of Dortmund’s youth academy) are two of the younger additions. Both were added to the squad after Leonardo Bittencourt and Moritz Leitner failed to establish themselves in the first team. The club loaned Leitner to Stuttgart and Bittencourt to Hannover 96 (with a buy-back option) so that they can further develop.
If the recent trajectory is accurate (back-to-back Bundesliga titles, the DFB Pokal and reaching the Champions League Final in a span of three years) this Borussia Dortmund side will only get better. It’s no wonder a week ago the club’s CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke said he’ll never let Klopp go.
Klopp was right. The fairytale didn’t end in breakup. There’s still more to come.
Alima Hotakie is a Toronto-based writer. Follow Alima on Twitter.