Next to Kabar and Duranville, it’s the next one. Kovac and the promotion of young talent… that just doesn’t fit together. At least Duranville will probably “only” be loaned out, but the other two will definitely change. What do the talents from the youth academy think when they see that youth players hardly get any chances? I think you could at least throw one or the other in in the final phase, like many other successful coaches do. Wätjen is coming back next summer and won’t see any land. Filippo Mane doesn’t get any real chances either.
If Campbell becomes Eintracht, they can soon rename themselves BVB 2.0. It’s crazy who has a BVB past. Collins, Knauff, Götze, Dahoud, Batshuayi (okay, he was just borrowed) and soon Campbell?
At BVB, Can and Süle are also running around with Eintracht’s past. The Kovac brothers form the coaching team. Until recently, Haller and Wolf were still in Dortmund. So it’s a give and take.
Kovac has something in common with a number of his predecessors that there is no talent from their own stable in Dortmund. Who are the last players who came from their own stable and made a lasting breakthrough in Dortmund? The Knauff and Collins mentioned above wouldn’t have made it in Dortmund either and had to take half a step back to Frankfurt in order to get into the Bundesliga sustainably.
The talent situation at BVB is currently really tricky because BVB is sitting between two stools.
BVB has had difficulties qualifying for the CL in recent years and the demands have grown accordingly so that EL qualification (or no qualification at all) would be quite difficult, not only financially.
Accordingly, despite the difficulties, they don’t dare to throw in talent who don’t already have the qualities of a regular player at 18-19 (Gittens?).
Knauff has still been given a lot of chances, but unlike Collins, I don’t see that he will ever be able to reach the top international level. To this day I still cannot understand why Collins was practically never given a chance, even though our IV was constantly in crisis.
Nevertheless, I see the talent development under previous coaches as being stronger, although not sufficient (we lost a talent like Blank even without Kovacs). This particularly annoys me with Campbell. The boy showed really good approaches and Stuttgart was very interested. Talent prices skyrocket pretty quickly, so why not give a Campbell more appearances throughout the season? If at the end of the season you come to the conclusion that it won’t be enough for BVB, you can at least sell it for a profit.
This year without professional experience will not improve the MW Campbells. So there would probably have been more to be earned with Campbell in the summer of 2025 (€4-6 million) than in the summer of 26 without further professional appearances.
After the euphoria of the final spurt of last season, it is actually becoming increasingly clear that Kovac does not fit in with BVB. Ricken claims that they want to focus more on youth again, but Kovacs is obviously not a fan of that. We also have very promising talents up our sleeves, which could also fall by the wayside thanks to Kovac.
We have to introduce a loan culture to BVB. Similar to Chelsea. Sign talent early, introduce them to BVB in the youth teams, see what the status is at 18-19 and then consistently loan them out to ambitious clubs in higher leagues (including the 2nd league) for 1-2 years. Whoever is good enough will strengthen BVB. Anyone who doesn’t get it will be sold. But then at least nobody has anything to blame and the talents were further optimally supported by a higher league and were given the chance to recommend themselves to me – instead of letting a Kabar go down against Leverkusen, they could have gained experience in the 2nd league for 1-2 years against Elversberg, Schalke and Co.