Dortmund won't win the Bundesliga under Nuri Sahin - but that's not really his fault

The young head coach is already struggling at Borussia Dortmund but it's no great surprise that the German giants picked another inexperienced tactician that was doomed to fail.

Prior to Saturday’s clash, Borussia Dortmund had only ever picked up six league points in five visits to the old Stadion An der Alten Försterei. But you wouldn’t have thought that when they kicked off the Bundesliga clash with Union Berlin. Adventurous in attack but wide open in attack, Nuri Sahin’s side wandered into a Berlin pine forest with all the naivety of Snow White and were subsequently pulled apart by a determined and well-coached host. It took Union just 23 minutes to open the scoring and at no point did Dortmund look capable of wresting control of the game back into their own hands and rescuing some points. 

The weekend defeat now means that Dortmund sit seventh in the table with just 10 points from their first six league games. Sahin’s side have so far conceded more goals than St Pauli and Mainz and scored fewer of their own goals than Wolfsburg. In terms of points won at this point in the league campaign, this is Dortmund’s worst start to a new season since the doomed 2014/15 campaign that finally saw Jürgen Klopp reach breaking point with the club and resign. And when we look at Sahin’s record as Dortmund manager to date, there’s very little to suggest that he will be the man to finally take the club back to the top of the Bundesliga table like his aforementioned predecessor. 

It’s often wise to ignore the league table and where one’s club sits in it until matchday 10, but in Dortmund’s case they’re already nine games into the new season and many fans are already drawing some pretty damning conclusions. As a scathing editorial on Kicker noted on Sunday night, Dortmund are “predictably unpredictable” in the way they seem to go from heroic victories to debilitating defeats from one week to the next. And all along the way fans and critics alike are struggling to see how this team are actually improving under Sahin.