Dortmund back on top

It's a day that has been long in coming, but one that's seemed inevitable for weeks. Dortmund are back on top of the Bundesliga.

Technically, they've been there once already this season, on match day 14. Back then, however, they were merely top due to goal difference, level on points with Gladbach.

Two months on, after match day 20, Dortmund are alone at the top, and deservedly so. The men in yellow and black are playing the best football in the league by a mile and are unbeaten in 14 matches - scoring 38 goals and winning ten games along the way.

Had the club not begun the season so poorly (losing three of their first six games), Germany's football pundits might be talking, as they were last year around this time, of a runaway march to the title.

As it stands, the praises they're now singing aren't far removed.

"You never see this team give up. They leave an impression of a sworn brotherhood that has fun playing football together. Those are brilliant conditions on which to build success," wrote Germany legend Günter Netzer in his column in the Bild am Sonntag tabloid.  

He made his point in the context of having seen Dortmund get an ugly win in Nuremberg on Friday night.

It was a game in which the team's often glittering combination play was stifled by an opponent with little interest in attacking, and the grind-it-out nature of the result was one of the reasons Netzer was impressed enough to predict they'd be title candidates for years to come.

Best yet to come

The other ground for Netzer's rosy long-term outlook for Dortmund was the coming of Marco Reus next season.

Netzer and the rest of the league have had a few weeks to mull the meaning of the Reus transfer, and Dortmund's current good form, along with the news this week that both Coach Jürgen Klopp and Sporting Director Michael Zorc had extended their contracts through 2016 mean the club are being taken more seriously than ever.

The 1970s-era Gladbach icon wrote that the Reus transfer meant that Dortmund were ready to put a certain rival on notice.

“It's a sign that the club can pay for players that otherwise only Bayern would be able to afford,” wrote Netzer.

Spending big to buy the Bundesliga's best has always been near the heart of Bayern's business model. Any competitor on that marketplace is a problem, in other words. And that realization, plus Dortmund's present imperiousness has touched off uncertainty in the Bavarian ranks.

"This isn't an optimal start to the second half of the season," said Bayern Sporting Director Christian Nerlinger. "Now the pressure is on us."

Ivica Olic, who scored Bayern's only goal as a substitute on Saturday, was even less sanguine. He said he was "certain" that the way they were playing at present "wasn't good enough for the title."

A mighty turnaround from the Munich club's chatter coming out of the winter break, when Bayern figures from Philipp Lahm to Uli Hoeness to the now cowed Nerlinger lined up to give interviews stating the club's destiny - another Bundesliga title.

Public relations

The public climb-down apparently underway on the Säbenerstrasse contrasts sharply with the way things are done in Dortmund. Borussia, as a rule, steer clear of self-aggrandizing talk - it means there's less crow to eat later should things go wrong, and makes saying the word Meisterschaft ("Championship") all the more important when it happens.

Perhaps even more importantly, Dortmund has learned to keep a secret. Club Chairman Hans-Joachim Watzke, when asked about his club's management structure by the in-house TV program BVB Total! said their secret was efficiency and secrecy.

"If we meet at noon and agree we should do something, we do it," said Watzke, referring to the leadership 'triumvirate' made up of himself, Klopp and Zorc.

"That decision might take two or three weeks to make somewhere else, and on the way to that final decision, two weeks from the start, you can read all about it in the newspaper."

He mentioned, as a good example, the club's capture of Marco Reus. That deal did seem to come together suddenly, but just as indicative could be the contract extensions for Klopp and Zorc.

In the same interview, Watzke was asked if he planned to talk to the two men about an extension before their contracts ran out in 2014.

"At some point in the future we'll sit down with them […] We can imagine continuing to work with them," Watzke said, hemming and hawing. He added: "I'm sure we're not the only club that can imagine Jürgen as their next coach."

Days later, deals with both men had been signed and made public. In Dortmund, on and off the pitch, everything is under control.

Author: Matt Hermann
Editor: Matt Zuvela