Der Klassiker, as the clash of the Bundesliga’s modern heavyweights likes to call itself, is not what it was. Borussia Dortmund travel to Bayern Munich on Saturday with little thought they might soon be disrupting the hierarchy.
They quietly fear the worst. Five times in their last six meetings Dortmund have lost to Bayern, the league leaders and serial champions, and the run includes a 4-0 and a 5-0 defeat.
Even while Dortmund have been armed with football’s most coveted young centre-forward, they have ended up second best. From Erling Braut Haaland’s point of view, battles against Bayern, contests he was encouraged to relish when he signed for Dortmund 14 months ago, are no more than a tease.
The 20-year-old has lost all three Klassikers he has played in, scored in two of them but in every case finished with a familiar tantalising sensation.
Last season, the hint of a real title duel evaporated on matchday 28, when Bayern came to Dortmund and a 1-0 away win extended the gap to their second-placed rivals to seven points. In this season's Bundesliga and German Super Cup meetings, both see-saw matches ending 3-2, Bayern let Dortmund dream of coming back from behind while always keeping that dream just out of reach.
The circumstances ahead of Saturday are concerning for Dortmund. They are 13 points behind Bayern with 11 fixtures remaining. More urgently, they are outside the top four, three points shy of Eintracht Frankfurt, currently fourth, which is the lowest position that comes with Champions League entry.
Dortmund plan around being in the Champions League, year in, year out, and in a time of economic recession and spectator-free stadiums, the income guarantees of participating in club football’s most glamorous competition is vital.
Haaland certainly designed his ambitious career-plan around spending Tuesday and Wednesday nights under European Cup lights for as long as he stays at Dortmund.
The phenomenal Norwegian has a ravenous appetite for Champions League football he would be reluctant to put aside. In the first leg of this season's last-16 he scoured his 17th and 18th European Cup goals, against Sevilla. Nobody had reached that tally younger or in fewer matches – 13 – than Haaland.
Neither he, nor Jadon Sancho, 21, nor, most likely, the clutch of brilliant teenagers, Gio Reyna, 18, Jude Bellingham, 17, and Youssoufa Moukoko, 16, expect to be Dortmunders for the majority of their playing careers. But the club know it and plan around it. The challenge is how to stagger the departures, and maximise the profits.
The Dortmund chief-executive, Hans-Joachim Watzke addressed the issue this week in an interview with Handelsblatt. If the coronavirus pandemic means turnstiles at the 80,000 Westfalen stadium not being fully opened next season, then significant player sales would be necessary.
“We will not be going to the banks to ask for crazy loans just so we don’t have to sell players,” Watzke said. “Already we need at least five years to get back to the status quo as it was, to the debt-levels we had before the virus.”
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Gallery: Bayern 5 Cologne 1
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Dortmund’s finances 12 months ago, when the pandemic first imposed its restrictions, were healthy. This is a club whose shrewd trading has yielded, in the previous three years, some €240 million from the nurturing and sales of Ousmane Dembele – sold to Barcelona – Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang – Arsenal – and Christian Pulisic, to Chelsea.
A year ago, Watzke was confidently telling suitors for Sancho, the 20-year-old England international and assists-provider supreme, they should think only of bids in excess of €120m. But the market was more buoyant then, and although Sancho is widely admired, particularly in the Premier League, the number of clubs in any auction for a €50m-plus footballer has shrunk.
Sancho is understood to feel ready for his next step, and senses Dortmund are at a threshold. It may be an exciting one, in Europe, where they next week hope to maintain their first-leg advantage over Sevilla and reach the Champions League last eight. But it can feel like an unsettling threshold off the field.
On the management side, old allies have moved on. Lucien Favre, the manager appointed in 2018, was sacked in December, and his replacement, Edin Terzic was a matter of weeks into the job when it became clear he was merely a caretaker. Marco Rose, of Borussia Monchengladbach, will take over in the summer.
Dortmund beat Rose’s Gladbach 1-0 in the German Cup in midweek, Sancho finishing off a handsome counter-attack to decide the tie. He also picked up a muscle problem, and his fitness will need assessing ahead of the Klassiker, along with that of left-back Rafa Guerreiro. Bayern, who have scored nine goals in their last two games, are ominously close to full strength.
