Bundesliga
Great players with stacks of silverware and now coaches with stars in the ascendancy, Borussia Dortmund’s Nuri Şahin and Bayern Munich’s Vincent Kompany pit their tactical wits against each other in Saturday’s Klassiker. bundesliga.com weighs up the bosses as they head into the crunch Matchday 12 encounter...
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Tactical approach
“If I had to name two coaches, I would put Jürgen Klopp as the complete package first, and then the obsession for details of Thomas Tuchel,” said Şahin when asked which of the coaches he played under influenced him most.
Like his illustrious predecessors at Dortmund, Şahin wants his team to control the ball and get forward. Summer arrival Pascal Groß is the central hub and another newboy, Serhou Guirassy, is the cutting edge of BVB’s possession-based game, contributing to Dortmund boasting the second-highest possession percentage in the Bundesliga (60 percent). Generally set up in a 4-5-1 with either a double pivot and a number 10 or with just a single holding midfielder and two box-to-box number 8s, his team has mobility and flexibility.
Naturally, having been so central to Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City side, Kompany has many of the traits of his and Bayern’s former boss: obsessive about possession football with high full-backs and a sweeper-keeper.
"As a coach, you have to stand for what you are as a personality: I love having the ball, being creative - and we also have to be aggressive on the pitch and courageous,” said Kompany to sum up his philosophy when he joined the club. “I'm now looking forward to the basics: working with the players, building a team. When the foundation is in place, success will follow."
And – as displayed by Bayern relentlessly pushing forward even when they have the game won – there is no chance of sitting on a lead. No fewer than six of their 11 Bundesliga games this season have been victories by three goals or more.
Watch: The Kompany System at Bayern
“The boss wants us to play with high intensity, even when we are leading 1-0 or 2-0, he wants three, four and five goals,” explained Harry Kane, himself responsible for a league-leading 14 strikes already. “That is our philosophy. We want to push the opponents to limits that they cannot maintain.”
Man-management
A living BVB legend, Şahin started his first senior coaching role with a head start on most given his aura, and the fact he had worked with a good chunk – but certainly not all – of the squad last season.
“He’s sometimes very calm, and then he can be very emotional,” explained defender Waldemar Anton, one of a clutch of major summer arrivals Şahin has had to integrate into his squad. “He works so much. He talks a lot and can get on very well with all sorts of different players.”
There is no doubt that for a man who played at Dortmund in their most recent prime, Liverpool and Real Madrid, there are high standards to be met and kept.
“Every coach has their vision, every person has their vision. For me, the most important thing is the human aspect. The key is for everyone to come in every morning with enthusiasm, work hard, and enjoy it. This includes the cooks, the staff and the players,” explained Şahin, a self-confessed perfectionist who will be just as demanding of himself. “It's sometimes exhausting and you try to work on it, but I didn't succeed. Eventually, I accepted that this is who I am, and I am happy with it. Maybe that's one reason why I became the head coach of Borussia Dortmund at the age of 35.”
Anyone who has seen Kompany in a press conference cannot help but be impressed. Fluent in German, English and French, he expresses himself like a politician at times, and his communication skills have clearly worked on his cosmopolitan squad.
Bringing together a juggernaut like Bayern is no easy task, and while the players no doubt appreciate his ability to speak to them calmly, they will just as equally be fully aware of the video that did the social media rounds of their boss dressing down his players while he was at Anderlecht.
“As a 38-year-old, he leads like a 65-year-old, like a father figure with the characteristics of arguing the essentials,” said former Dortmund player and coach and Bayern sporting director Matthias Sammer. “He ignores the side issues. He has managed to unite this team, this club."
“At these very big clubs, you can make it about everything around you if you want to look at it that way, but based on my learnings in the past and how you have to approach it, it’s ultimately just 11 players playing against another team with a ball and a set of rules,” Kompany explained. “You have to just keep doing what you are good at because that’s the reason why you are here.”
Season so far
Dortmund are searching for that most precious football commodity: consistency. They have won all eight home games in all competitions this season, and six out of six in the Bundesliga, the division’s best record. Only bottom side Bochum have a worse record on the road, however, with Dortmund picking up just a point away from home.
“I know we don’t have a lot of time, but we have already shown what we can do,” explained Anton. “But we have to be more consistent on the pitch, that’s our aim.”
“We have faith in our team and we trust our coach,” said BVB legend and backroom decision-maker Lars Ricken. “We have in Nuri, I think, a top coach who is going to become a better coach with every game and every tough situation.”
Watch: Dortmund crushed Freiburg in their previous Bundesliga fixture
If that sounds like a vote of confidence, it is, as Dortmund‘s woeful away form, which means they come into the Klassiker 10 points off leaders Bayern, has inevitably raised questions. And the stats are worryingly stark: averaging three goals a game at home, it’s 0.8 away; 19 goal attempts per 90 minutes at home, eight away. And they have conceded 2.4 goals a game outside the Signal Iduna Park, 1.0 in it.
With Sahin setting up the same and sending them out with the same ambitions, the players their part of responsibility: they average 57 percent possession away from home, 63% at home, and run almost four kilometres (2.5 miles) less on average in away games.
“The situation is precarious,” warned former Bayern and Germany striker turned pundit Nils Petersen. Dortmund did pick up their first away win of the season in all competitions with the 3-0 defeat of Dinamo Zagreb in their midweek Champions League game, and it’s certainly an advantage for Sahin’s men that the first 2024/25 Klassiker is in front of the Yellow Wall.
The problem for Dortmund is that they will come up against a Red Wall. Kompany’s side have not conceded a goal in 450 minutes of Bundesliga football since the 1-1 draw with defending champions Bayer Leverkusen on Matchday 5. They last went five straight league games without conceding under Carlo Ancelotti in 2017, and did six in a row under Guardiola before that.
The reason? Well, one of them is their intensity. They’ve allowed only 54 attempts on their goal – the best tally at this stage of a season since data collection began in 1992/93 – which is the fruit of good ol’ fashioned sweat and toil: they cover 119.1 kilometres (74 miles) collectively on average per game – the fourth-highest tally in the league – and a major uplift on last season when they were clocking up 115.4km (72 miles) per 90 minutes, the lowest in the division. And then there is that unity.
“We are looking to play as a team. If you watch our games, it’s not just the defenders who are defending; it’s the offensive players, too, who help us out,” explained France international centre-back Dayot Upamecano, who has formed a rock-solid partnership with Minjae Kim. “We are a team and when we step out onto the pitch, we play as one. That is what is helping us to be successful."
In fact, Kompany would struggle to be more successful right now. Just 11 matches into his Bundesliga coaching career, he has a record that is second to none. Literally. He is the fourth coach not to lose the first 11 matches in the German top-flight along with Guardiola, Karlheinz Feldkamp and Klaus Toppmöller. But with 29 points from a possible 33 and a +29 goal difference, he stands above them all.
“If you can be at a big club with top players and somehow you get to put the team first, you can achieve wonderful things,” Kompany said before the season started. “I really believe in that and I'm committed to that. So, if you ask me what I would like to see at the end of the season, it's that we're actually talking about a great team. That would be wonderful for me.” It seems that we already are.