Eintracht Frankfurt and Borussia from Dortmund, who were humiliated in Kiel, are playing for three points at the start of the second half of the Bundesliga. But it’s about more, it’s about the hierarchy in German football.
Now he’s actually gone, just like he wanted. Donyell Malen has a contract with Aston Villa signed. That was the one who was the top goalscorer at Borussia Dortmund last season. The one who once came from the for a transfer fee of around 30 million euros PSV Eindhoven was fetched. The one who scored 30 goals for BVB in 94 Bundesliga games. This corresponds to a very decent rate of 0.319 goals per game on average for a striker who is mostly deployed on the wing.
In this case, it’s worth going several places after the decimal point, because there is a player who has a rate of 0.324, and when he’s probably gone soon, it will make headlines instead of being acknowledged with a shrug of the shoulders. It’s about Omar Marmoush, for whom Eintracht Frankfurt could reportedly receive more than 70 million euros if an agreement is reached Manchester City would come.
Marmoush is so expensive because he got so much better at Eintracht. This season he has a percentage of 0.882 – 15 goals in 17 games. Maybe he will stop there, but maybe he will also appear on Friday (January 17th, 2025, from 8:20 p.m. in the radio report on the Sportschau) when Eintracht meets Borussia Dortmund.
BVB has a lot of problems, everyone became aware of that when the team lost 2:4 to newly promoted Holstein Kiel on Tuesday and then there was further criticism that something like that wasn’t possible and that it wasn’t worthy of a club like BVB. something like that shouldn’t happen. But it’s been happening for years without anyone finding a conclusive answer as to why.
Nuri Şahin did in Kiel what a 36-year-old head coach does when he completed his first half series as coach of Borussia Dortmund with an average of 1,471 points. He threatened consequences, asserted that he knew what was going on in the industry, and he took responsibility for “non-performance.”
Nuri Şahin won the championship as a player with Borussia Dortmund. Sebastian Kehl too, he is the sports director. Lars Ricken too, he is the new managing director. Matthias Sammer too, he is the external consultant. He primarily advises Hans-Joachim Watzke. He never played for Borussia Dortmund, but has been the boss for 20 years now. He brought back Sven Mislintat, who never played for BVB, but as chief scout he brought in many players who got better in Dortmund. Those times are long gone.
Krösche was in demand in Dortmund
Watzke, sources at BVB and also in Frankfurt assure, would have liked to have brought in someone who had never played for Borussia Dortmund, had never been employed there and never slept in black and yellow bed linen. Markus Krösche, however, remained sports director at Eintracht Frankfurt and even signed a new contract there. The power he has in Frankfurt is something that no one in Dortmund wanted to promise him.
A few days ago, Borussia Dortmund extended the contract with Kehl, who has a distant relationship with Mislintat, as there are some people in charge in the ball game club’s power structure who don’t get along well with other people in charge. Friction creates cold at BVB, and perhaps that is at least a useful clue when it comes to the question of why something happens so often in Dortmund that shouldn’t happen.
Double bottom Club World Cup
What shouldn’t happen for economic reasons is a season without a Champions League. Last season, fifth place in the table was exceptionally enough to qualify because other German teams had also scored heavily in a special ranking. It doesn’t look like that this season, but Borussia will fall gently again, because alongside Bayern Munich they will represent the Bundesliga at the Club World Cup, where there are also several million euros to be earned.
But at some point it could be that there is no longer a false bottom, that other teams move past and regularly rake in money that the listed company with current sales of well over half a billion euros will miss.
Frankfurt sees the chance to overtake BVB
Eintracht Frankfurt has recognized the opportunity to overtake the ailing industry giant. They don’t say that publicly, but they say it, and the conditions are currently such that no one should attest to their megalomania.
The Frankfurters recently made a turnover of 390 million euros, they received a 90 million euro transfer fee for Randal Kolo Muani, and a similar amount will probably soon flow for Marmoush. Hugo Ekitiké is a player in the squad who cost 20 million but is now being traded at a much higher price because he improved in Frankfurt.
At 22, Ekitiké was the sixth youngest of the 16 players used in Tuesday’s 4-1 win over SC Freiburg, which gave Eintracht an eight-point lead over Borussia Dortmund. Nathaniel Brown is 21 years old, Oscar Höjlund and Hugo Larsson are 20, Can Uzun is only 19. Nnamdi Collins is 21 years old.
The ex-Dortmunder Collins is the next discovery at Eintracht
He played on the right in the back three and scored his first goal in his eighth Bundesliga game. Collins was signed by Borussia Dortmund in the summer of 2023 for a fee of under one million euros. There he played in the second team, but earned so well that he initially had to make sacrifices in Frankfurt. Shortly before Christmas, Collins signed a new contract valid until 2030, which will bring him and possibly later Eintracht a lot more money.
Krösche believes that Collins will become a German senior national player. In the industry, the defender is compared to Antonio Rüdiger. He once played for Borussia Dortmund in his youth.