Borussia Dortmund’s worries grow as Bundesliga drifts toward Bayern Munich monopoly

Momentum Dortmund generated with league titles in 2011 and 2012 seems a faraway memory, writes Ian Hawkey

Borussia Dortmund celebrating with the German Super Cup trophy after their victory over Bayern Munich in Dortmund on August 13, 2014. Ina Fassbender / Reuters

The distance between first and second place in the Bundesliga at the end of the past two seasons combined amounts to 44 points.

Bayern Munich won the 2014 title at record speed but, in the spirit of optimism that drives all clubs into the opening weekend of a the campaign, the runners-up, Borussia Dortmund, can console themselves with the knowledge that the final arithmetic was slightly more favourable to them than it had been a year earlier.

The difference between gold and silver last May was 19 points; in 2013, it stood at 25.

Fact is, Bayern eased off once the title was in their hands; fact is, the traction Dortmund established in the early years of this decade has slowed since they contested the 2013 Uefa Champions League final with Bayern and narrowly lost it 2-1.

Dortmund’s Bundesliga titles of 2011 and 2012 seem a faraway memory, not least because key personnel involved in those triumphs have slipped away with monotonous regularity: Shinji Kagawa, to Manchester United, the English Premier League’s most-titled institution; then Mario Gotze, to Germany’s mightiest, Bayern, where he is now joined by Robert Lewandowski, the Polish striker who contributed 74 league goals in his 131 matches for Dortmund over the past four years.

It brings into question the competitiveness canof the Bundesliga when the strongest club appears to regard the second-best as a deluxe feeder.

Already there is a justified fear at Dortmund that in the summer of 2015, Marco Reus, their exciting, quicksilver striker, may be going through the same presentation ceremony in Munich that Gotze did in 2013 and Lewandowski did in June.

While German football is entitled to look around the rest of the world and congratulate itself for its place at the summit of the sport, its league has to confront comparisons with its foreign peers that are not so flattering.

For most of the past decade, a conspicuous weakness in the structure of Spain’s Primera Liga, for instance, has seemed to be its unbalanced concentration of resources and success between just two clubs.

But the Primera Liga just proclaimed a champion that was not Real Madrid or Barcelona, and, even before the coup staged by Atletico Madrid last season, the joust between the two behemoths has been a duel unlikely to be dulled by gaps of 25 or 19 points in the table.

The English Premier League, for all its reduced impact on the Champions League in the past two years, still starts each August with a genuine debate among three, four or five contenders about title prospects.

Dortmund's head coach, the charismatic Jurgen Klopp, is not given to defeatism but did admit, on the eve of the new season, that his principle objective was to, once again, "secure qualification for the 2015/16 Champions League and, if Bayern ever have a blank period, it'll be up to us to take advantage".

The club’s recruitment strategy has been to establish greater strength in depth, in the realistic expectation they will be involved in Europe for some years and that Klopp’s high-energy approach to each 90 minutes places intense physical demands on the players.

“We now have good cover in each position,” Klopp said after a summer in which a pair of international strikers – Italy’s Ciro Immobile and Colombia’s Adrian Ramos – and a young defender, Matthias Ginter, who was part of Germany’s World Cup squad – were brought in.

He has to plan for them developing quickly to fill in for the departing stars and he can feel mildly encouraged by last week's Super Cup match against Bayern. Dortmund won it, 2-0, with goals from two attacking players brought in after Gotze's move away a year ago, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.

But Bayern fielded a side well below full strength that evening and, by the time Dortmund meet them in the league at the beginning of November, they must hope the space between them in the table is not yawning too wide.

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