The dangers of a veterans’ club

The 2023/24 season is over and the wind of change is blowing through Borussia Dortmund. Hans-Joachim Watzke is gone. A new triumvirate is watching over the Ruhr area, and they are cleaning up and taking stock. Edin Terzic is gone. Sven Mislintat is back. A flood of new names has joined the Westfalenstadionready to breathe new life into an organization that has suffered from stagnation for too long.

Only… are they?

Go down the list: Nuri Sahin. Sven Bender. Lukasz Piszczek. Possibly Marcel Schmelzer. Add to that an organization that has already featured Sebastian Kehl and Lars Ricken, as well as Sven Mislintat, who never played for BVB but earned his stripes as a scout and analyst in the same era. I don’t know about you, but with every new hire, there’s a quiet, subtle voice nagging in the back of my head that keeps repeating something like this:

“Hey… isn’t it strange that the BVB management seems to be turning into a group of old buddies who used to play together and now give each other jobs like they’re candy?”

At this point, it’s really just a gut feeling that could prove to be completely misplaced as time goes on, but it seems like Borussia Dortmund is becoming more and more of an old boys’ club. What does that mean? To give you an idea of ​​what I’m talking about, I’ll turn to the gold standard of all internet knowledge: Wikipedia.

Originally, the term referred to social and business connections between former students of elite male-only schools, but today it is also used to refer to any closed relationship system that limits opportunities to the group. In the US, the term “old boys network” is more geared towards the inside information that includes connections to powerful and ambitious people made through work, professional and charitable organizations, and private clubs.

Generally speaking, the Old Boys Club is a phenomenon in business, government, academia, and other organizations in which a closed network of well-known individuals can maintain power in an organization through mutual support and favoritism, based primarily on shared characteristics and personal relationships rather than merit. It is the type of organization in which a phone call to an old friend accompanied by a “Do you want a job?” is the rule, not the exception. This phenomenon has been observed in many different contexts, including academic background (such as a shared past at an elite university or private school), gender, race, social class, or more, but none of these factors are required.

Organisations dealing with a Old Boys Club can suffer from a variety of factors that can harm both the individuals within the organization and the organization as a whole. For individuals who are not part of the Old Boys Clubthey suffer career stagnation, a perceived lack of respect, and even tangible effects like lower pay. Affected organizations can suffer from groupthink, talent loss, and a lack of innovation as anyone who goes against the narrative is pushed aside or leaves on their own. Over time, they can become stagnant and bloated, while organizations with a more open, outward-facing environment are more able to innovate and evolve over time.

This brings me to Borussia Dortmund. Anyone who pays attention can see a clear pattern in the many changes in management positions over the last few years. Sebastian Kehl, Sven Mislintat, Sven Bender, Nuri Sahin and others were all involved to some extent at Borussia Dortmund before returning to the club as managers a year later. Now Nuri Sahin is bringing in Lukasz Piszczek as assistant coach, along with some of his assistant coaches from Antalyaspor. You would think that someone at the Westfalenstadion has opened a time portal back to 2012, which just begs the question: can we bring back Neven Subotic too? Maybe he could head up the merchandise department… and while they’re at it, can they bring back Psy too?

Of course, it’s too early to judge these moves individually, and I’m not even predicting that any of them won’t work. We don’t have much information to base our decision on, aside from Sahin’s limited experience in Turkey, which I think is pretty promising. Maybe these moves all work, and it’s just that Jürgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund in 1929 were the Yankees of future football managers… but something tells me that not every single one of these hires was the result of a thorough search of every corner of world football for the most qualified candidate.

Ultimately, we can only speculate on the circumstances surrounding each of these new hires. It’s possible that the bosses at Dortmund genuinely believe they are hiring the best possible candidates. Even if that’s the case, I fear that perception is entirely misguided and more likely based on the belief that assembling a group of nebulous “winners” who “bleed BVB” can return the club to its golden era.

World football is in the midst of something of a revolution. Clubs everywhere are modernising at breakneck speed. Football is becoming a game played in office buildings as well as on the pitch. Sports and analytics departments are growing, and new, bigger coaching teams with groundbreaking tactics are constantly changing the game. As successful as they were in their day, the departures of Hans-Joachim Watzke and Michael Zorc seemed like an opportunity to take a new, modern direction. Instead, it feels like the club is moving backwards, relying on a network of pals who may have dominated the pitch during the Obama years but whose abilities to run a club in 2024 are far more uncertain.