Dortmund and the difficult next step

So then, the second Bundesliga title has been bagged for Dortmund, and with reaching the final of the DFB- Pokal against Bayern, I think it's fair to say that it has been a more than successfull domestic season for Dortmund. Additionally, Dortmund finished the season with a whopping 81 points and played some really lovely football to boot at well.

This is in oppossition to our showings in Europe though, where we came fourth in a group containing Arsenal (in crisis at the time), Marseille (who generally were not that impressive) and Olympiakos Piräus (not very impressive either). I must admit that I was disappointed and emberassed by our weak showing. The early exit from the European competitions probably helped our league form, which really picked up after the winter break, i.e. when we were out of all European competitions. The question is, what does Dortmund do to reach that next step, the ability to compete on both the domestic and the European front, to represent the Bundesliga befitting of a German champion and to push into that circle of truly elite teams?

The first point, imho, is: experience. It was noticable, the way that our defense for example, that hardly set a foot wrong during the whole season (apart from one crazy 4-4 against Stuttgart perhaps) looked like Kreisklasse players on the international parquett. The way that Hummels was letting himself being duped by the Marseille strikers had my jaw dropping at times. Hopefully this will be better as our young key players continue to amass valuable experience, also with their national teams.

This leads me to point two: Keep the stars. We sold Nuri Sahin last season to go and sit in the stands at Real Madrid and struggled the first half of the season, especially since poor Sven Bender picked up one facial injury after the other and Ilkay Gündogan took until the second half of the season to really get going. Now, Barrios is already gone chasing the big bucks in China, which makes it imperative that we at least keep Lewandowski. He still has contract until 2014, and Watzke has already come out and pretty much said that he wont be sold. Kagawa however is a different story. Only one year left on the contract and with rumoured interest from big clubs from England. If the offer is right, he might well be off.

One of the problems is the wage structure. Dortmund so far have got by with paying roughly between 40 to 50 million Euro in wages annually. However, the truly big football clubs pay in excess of a 100 million Euro (even including such nominally financially moderate clubs such as Arsenal). Dortmund has already used the contract of extensions of players such as Götze to increase their salary, but the question of course is, how far can the club go? Especially since the spector of the 2005 near- insolvency still looms large. One positive sign is that the financial development continues to be very good, and Dortmund has managed to sign better sponsorship deals thanks to our success on the domestic level.

Well then, the next European season is certainly going to be interesting.