Borussia Dortmund 1-5 Stuttgart: Talking points from the game which ended the Lucien Favre era

The End of the Lucien Favre Era: What is next for Borussia Dortmund?

While there are many things we could talk about regarding the game against Stuttgart, I feel it only makes sense to initially focus on the biggest one of them, which is undoubtedly the news that has been going around since Sunday: Lucien Favre has been let go by Borussia Dortmund.

Its strange, in a way, that despite their current position, in Lucien Favre, Borussia Dortmund had, statistically speaking, the best manager in the club’s history. Favre amassed the joint most points per game (2.09) alongside Thomas Tuchel, a total that outperforms club legends Matthias Sammer and Jürgen Klopp. In many ways, this simple fact may provide more credence to the argument that in football, statistics are not all encompassing. While Dortmund have flown high and shone brightly under Favre, they have also seen the wings of their potential clipped just as they thought they were getting close to toppling Bayern.

Flying too close to the Bundesliga summit has had an “Icarus effect” on the Ruhr side. In Favre’s first season at the helm, we saw the club come so very close to clinching it’s first Bundesliga title in nearly a decade, only to endure a dismal winter campaign that saw their sizeable atop the table diminish, allowing Bayern to once again reign supreme.

Favre’s second season saw an influx of talent join the ranks at the Westfalenstadion. A wealth of talent the likes of which the club had not seen for many, many years. Despite the quality of the squad, the club was once again plagued by inconsistency, stifling yet another promising title bid. There were many questions surrounding some of the decisions Favre made in both these seasons, be it in terms of formation, lineups or substitutions.

Some of these decisions were viewed as negative, too safe, or unambitious. Just taking the game against Stuttgart as an example, a glaring error in my opinion came in the form of taking off Emre Can in the second half. The reason I say this isn’t because Can was having one of his best games; he gave away the penalty for Stuttgart’s first goal in the 24th minute. But Can is one of Dortmund’s real fighters, a team that seemingly lacks that inner drive at times to either kill off or grind out a result when necessary. In one sense, substituting Can to keep him from picking up another yellow made sense, but the minute he was off the pitch, Dortmund completely collapsed. While it’s hard to say whether the collapse was directly initiated by his substitution, it can be said that he was one of the few on the pitch actually attempting to put in a shift, and that lack of energy could have played a role in shifting the game even more so towards a Stuttgart side clearly on the ascendency.

Favre has often also had a propensity to wait very late to make his substitutions, and often they weren’t as attacking minded as one would have liked. Despite the example of Can coming off and an influx of attacking talent coming on in this game not serving as a primary example of this, conservative decision making in itself is a trait of the Favre era – in essence, a return to stability.

For while Dortmund are in a not so great place now, the last few seasons, while not perhaps a display of harnessing the team’s full potential, are a far cry from the horrors that began under the two Peters. In two years’ time, Favre has been able to stabilize the team and once again make Dortmund a threat, a real challenger.

It is this fact which makes this season rather sad for me, because it is hard to fully criticize Favre and say he is not a good trainer. He has proven otherwise on numerous occasions, but be it because of his quiet, subdued demeanor, or simply a matter of reaching his ceiling with the club, his tactics and leadership have not been able to fully bring out the latent potential in this squad and translate it into the success that seemed so promising when he took the helm. The sacking of Lucien Favre after this game was far from inevitable, considering the stance both Aki Watzke and Michael Zorc have taken on the matter in the past, but it is understandable and acceptable considering the club’s goals are now in jeopardy moving forward.

In speaking of the future, it would seem that the interim option to lead Dortmund moving forward will be assistant coach Edin Terzic. It is a bold move by Dortmund’s hierarchy to put trust in Terzic because this will be his first head coach role, which will come with the pressure of expectation as this season is not even half done. Alongside Terzic, Dortmund’s U-17 coach Sebastian Geppert and Otto Addo will be seated in the dugout for the foreseeable future. In the long term, Marco Rose is reportedly the man Borussia Dortmund want to take the team to that next level Favre got so close to.