It takes more than losing his star to keep Dortmund's Jürgen Klopp down
The Bundesliga season starts on Friday and the positiveness has returned for Klopp despite the dominance of Bayern Munich
Amid all the hype that surrounded the Bundesliga's two leading lights towards the end of last season, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, there was one moment which briefly deflated most people (apart from those involved with the Bavarians). In the week of the first legs of the Champions League semi-finals Bild broke the story that Bayern were signing Dortmund's best player, Mario Götze, for €37m (£32m). The club already leading the domestic league by a depressing margin, 20 points, were purchasing the most talented player of a generation from the club lying second. It was brutal.
"It is a catastrophe for German football," was the headline of a piece written by Carsten Heidböhmer in Stern. Lothar Matthäus, the former Bayern midfielder, said he was "shocked" and added that the deal – and the timing of it – was "damaging the credibility" of the sport. The fear was that the competitiveness of the Bundesliga would suffer. Would anyone be able to catch Bayern again? Even the Borussia Dortmund manager, the ultra-positive Jürgen Klopp, admitted that the transfer had hit him hard.
Luckily it takes more than losing his best player to his worst rivals to keep Klopp down. In July, as the Dortmunders gathered to start their preparations for the new season, which starts on Friday with Bayern taking on Borussia Mönchengladbach, his positiveness had returned. Well, to an extent. He admitted that it would be harder than ever to wrestle the league title from Bayern but said the rest of the Bundesliga should not give up.
In an interview with Welt am Sonntag, when asked what it would take for BVB to be champions again, he said: "An incredible amount. Bayern were probably the best team in the world last season. But despite that they could not beat us in the two games we played in the league. And maybe we can grasp a certain energy and motivation from the fact that we did not win anything last season. We have bows and arrows. And when we aim precisely, we can hit the target. It's only that Bayern have a bazooka. The probability that they will hit the target is clearly higher. But then Robin Hood was apparently quite successful."
Klopp has every reason to be positive. They have bought cleverly, replacing Götze with the Liverpool target Henrikh Mkhitaryan as well as adding the highly sought-after St Etienne striker Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang to the attack while keeping Robert Lewandowski to his contract despite its having only one year to run. It is a huge gamble but it displays the feisty attitude of the German and European runners-up. They will not lie down.
Dortmund will also have been boosted by their 4-2 Super Cup win over Bayern, with Marco Reus in particularly impressive form. And Aubameyang said: "We're not far off Bayern. They have a great team with great players but we showed in the Super Cup that they can be beaten."
Bayern, though, start as favourites. They may have lost Mario Gomez to Fiorentina – he scored 39 goals last season, eight of them in the Champions League – and are about to sell the brilliant Luiz Gustavo to, possibly, Wolfsburg but those losses should be cancelled out by the arrivals of Götze and Thiago Alcântara, the Barcelona midfielder who was linked with a move to Manchester United and who scored a hat-trick in the Under-21 final for Spain against Italy.
The Bayern hierarchy has, for obvious reasons, heaped praise on the €25m newcomer, the chairman, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, saying Thiago is a "fantastic player with great potential who will make Bayern stronger" while the new manager, Pep Guardiola, said "he is a good worker, has a good head and is good one against one".
Outside Bavaria, however, people are less sure. The former Bayern manager Felix Magath said he was sure the signing of the Spaniard would become a problem. "I see it as a problem that a Spanish coach signs a Spanish player. He [Guardiola] will have a problem with Thiago because either the other players will be unhappy because he plays all the time or, if Guardiola doesn't play him, there will be a lot of questions about the transfer fee. Guardiola could have saved himself that problem." The Barcelona president, Sandro Rosell, was even more scathing about Thiago, saying he was not disappointed that the player had left, adding: "We got €25m for a reserve player."
There are other challengers apart from Bayern and Dortmund, of course, with Schalke and Bayer Leverkusen chief among them. Schalke have kept Julian Draxler, who had offers from Manchester City and Real Madrid, and Leverkusen have bought cleverly with Son Heung-min (Hamburg) and Emre Can (Bayern) the most exciting arrivals.
A title race consisting of those four clubs would be exhilarating but it is unlikely. Magath, for all the problems he foresees with Thiago, believes Bayern can go the whole season undefeated while Hamburg's Rafael van der Vaart thinks Bayern's reserve side "would have a good chance of winning the title".
That may be an exaggeration but the sentiment is clear. Bayern will not relinquish their titles easily.
http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2013/aug/08/klopp-dortmund-bayern-munich-bundesliga
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(and dortmund mainly because of the cl money and the götze fee)
