After four defeats in a row
©IMAGO
After four competitive defeats in a row, Borussia Dortmund is parting ways with coach Nuri Şahin. The club confirmed reports from “Bild” and “Sky” on Wednesday morning. The coach and the team are said to have been informed of the decision that night at the hotel in Bologna, after which the 36-year-old said goodbye to the team. BVB lost 2-1 in the Champions League there. Şahin took over as head coach of the Black and Yellows at the start of the season and scored an average of 1.48 points from 27 games.
Sports director Lars Ricken explained: “We really appreciate Nuri Şahin and his work, we wanted a long collaboration and hoped until the end that we would achieve a turning point in sport together. After four defeats in a row, due to only one win from the last nine games and as we are currently tenth in the Bundesliga table, we have unfortunately lost faith in being able to achieve our sporting goals in the current constellation. This decision also hurts me personally, but it was no longer avoidable after the game in Bologna.”
Şahin had already assessed his situation realistically after the game. “It’s clear: you have to win games and we lost the game again. There are now four games in a row that we have lost,” he said and added: “If a change of coach solves all the problems, solves all the secondary battlegrounds, then that’s no problem at all.”
The defeat was the fourth in a row – there is still no win in this calendar year. BVB had previously lost with Şahin in the Bundesliga against Bayer Leverkusen (2:3), at Holstein Kiel (2:4) and at Eintracht Frankfurt (0:2). Werder Bremen awaits in the Bundesliga on Saturday (3:30 p.m./Sky).
Internal power struggles in the BVB management team are likely to make the search for a coach more difficult
But things are not only simmering at BVB in the coaching position, but also at the managerial level. “It’s simply about this club finally finding peace and calming down. “That the club will be successful again, that we don’t have any secondary theaters of war,” said Şahin in Bologna. Internal power struggles in the management team around Ricken, sports director Sebastian Kehl, advisor Matthias Sammer, squad planner Sven Mislintat and club boss Hans-Joachim Watzke have been shaping the picture for months.
The search for a successor for Şahin is likely to be correspondingly difficult. Some candidates like Roger Schmidt are said to show no interest in getting involved because of the discrepancies in the sporting leadership. The question also arises as to whether BVB would only look for a short-term option or a long-term option. And so names from Erik ten Hag to Niko Kovac to Urs Fischer haunt the Dortmund area.
Şahin was the eighth BVB coach since Klopp
Since the end of Jürgen Klopp’s era almost ten years ago, the coaching position at the Revierklub has been a constant construction site. Şahin is already the eighth coach since 2015 to fail after Klopp’s departure from Dortmund. Among them were high-profile players such as Thomas Tuchel, Lucien Favre and Marco Rose.
After the end of current Leipzig head coach Rose in the summer of 2022, BVB had Edin Terzic and most recently Şahin coaches with a strong connection to Dortmund, but without much previous experience. Terzic was BVB’s youth and assistant coach for years before he took over Dortmund as head coach in December 2020 for six months and then again for two years after Rose’s departure.
Although BVB under him only lost the championship on the last matchday in 2023 and made it to the Champions League final against Real Madrid (0-2) last summer, the club and Terzic parted ways. His previous assistant coach Şahin, who only returned to BVB in this role in January 2024, took over his youth club, with great praise from those in charge, where he had already joined at the age of twelve and for which he had made his professional debut at the age of 16.