How can Borussia Dortmund overhaul their porous defence

As the dust settled on Sunday's 5-1 defeat to VfB Stuttgart, Borussia Dortmund started facing the questions again. The same questions that have propped up again and again in the recent seasons. How to fix BVB's porous defence? After getting deservedly beaten by Stuttgart by the scoreline of 5-1, Dortmund’s tactical approach to the game was questioned again.

Though in the end, responsibility generally falls on how players are able to perform, but setting up a team as per a particular tactic is a coach’s forte, so it was inevitable that despite still being a novice in coaching, Sahin’s tactics will come into question.

If we refer to the below table (data from fbref fetched season by season), it can be seen that in the Bundesliga alone, Borussia Dortmund have conceded more than one goal per game in every season since 2016/17 and the issue has been not addressed yet despite appointment of coaches of varying tactical acumens over the years.

The above data clearly indicates that in recent years, clean sheets have been hard to come by for Borussia Dortmund. Moving on to the current scenario, BVB were able to cover up their cracks in defence by playing some neat football and due to the brilliant individual performance of few players. But Stuttgart exposed those frailties similar to how a knife cuts through butter. If not for Gregor Kobel, it would have been even more worse than the 5-1 defeat. In this article, we will highlight a few problems leading to Dortmund conceding goals along with our take on how to resolve it.