{"id":23214,"date":"2020-12-19T14:04:13","date_gmt":"2020-12-19T14:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/?p=23214"},"modified":"2020-12-19T14:04:13","modified_gmt":"2020-12-19T14:04:13","slug":"in-football-what-qualifies-as-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/2020\/12\/19\/in-football-what-qualifies-as-success\/","title":{"rendered":"In football, what qualifies as success?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Even after Lucien Favre turned 60, he could still do things with a ball that left even some of European football\u2019s brightest talents just a little awe-struck<\/strong><\/h4>\n

He could juggle it as well as any of the budding superstars under his tutelage at Borussia Dortmund. He had tricks up his sleeve that some of them had not yet mastered. He could join in a small-sided training game \u2014 alongside Erling Haaland and Jadon Sancho and the rest of his squad, almost all of them less than half his age \u2014 and hold his own.<\/p>\n

Favre has always been a coach in the traditional sense. Some managers are characterized as motivators, rhetoricians and demagogues, urging their troops into battle. Others are portrayed as canny, scheming strategists. Favre is, to some extent, a throwback to what the role was when it was first conceived: He is, at heart, a teacher of technique.<\/p>\n

His training sessions \u2014 at Dortmund and at Nice and at Borussia M\u00f6nchengladbach, and all the other stops on his long and subtly successful managerial career \u2014 are regularly interrupted in order to amend some individual technical detail, to make a minor alteration to where a foot is planted or how a ball is struck or the way a body is shaped to receive a pass.<\/p>\n

It is a risky approach for a coach in elite football. In his time at Real Madrid, Rafael Ben\u00edtez found that his interventions along similar lines were not warmly welcomed by his star-studded squad. They did not, several players made clear, need someone to tell them how to play football.<\/p>\n

Favre, though, never faced that issue at Dortmund. In part, that was because of his own, enduring ability. Those tricks in training games were not just evidence of a showman streak or a waxing nostalgia for his days as a player in his native Switzerland; they were a way of garnering respect, a sign to his players that he had something to teach them.<\/p>\n

Just as significant, though, the tricks were a testament to the profile of Dortmund\u2019s squad. Favre was fired this week because a club of Dortmund\u2019s stature could not tolerate yet another season drifting away from Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga title race. It most certainly could not accept the idea of a 5-1 defeat at home to Stuttgart, or a struggle to qualify for next season\u2019s Champions League.<\/p>\n

Dortmund is, after all, Germany\u2019s other superpower, a club that regards itself \u2014 in terms of finance and history and clout \u2014 as effectively the Bundesliga\u2019s second in command. It is one thing being overwhelmed by Bayern; it is quite another to glance down the league table and have to spool through Bayer Leverkusen, RB Leipzig and Wolfsburg, too, before finding Dortmund.<\/p>\n

If Bayern Munich expects to win championships, Dortmund at least demands to be contending for them. Under Favre, in charge since 2018, that had not quite materialized. When it started to look like this season, too, might prove another false dawn, the cutthroat rules that govern Europe\u2019s elite clubs kicked in, and the 63-year-old Favre had to go.<\/p>\n

But Dortmund is not like any other club of its size in Europe. Though Favre and the sporting director Michael Zorc had added a dash of experience to the squad over the last couple of years, reacquiring Mats Hummels from Bayern and signing the likes of Emre Can and Axel Witsel, it remains a tremendously young place.<\/p>\n

Haaland and Sancho might be two of the most coveted players in Europe, but they are both only 20, and Haaland has yet to complete a full year in one of the continent\u2019s major leagues. Giovanni Reyna has emerged as a key part of the team over a similar time span, but he is still just 18.<\/p>\n

Jude Bellingham was signed over the summer with one eye on a slow-burn introduction to the first team, only to force his way into Favre\u2019s plans almost immediately. He is 17. Youssoufa Moukoko, a prodigiously talented striker in the club\u2019s youth teams and regarded, already, as a natural deputy to Haaland, has only last month turned 16.<\/p>\n

This is Dortmund\u2019s system: to recruit blue-chip talents from across Europe \u2014 and occasionally further afield \u2014 and to expose them to elite football, in both the Bundesliga and the Champions League, earlier than might be possible elsewhere. It is that reputation for trusting and empowering youth that the club emphasizes in its sales pitch to prospective signings.<\/p>\n

And it was that approach that made Favre, in some senses, the perfect coach for Dortmund. For all their very obvious talent, these are players who still need some instruction on the finer, technical points of the game. They have not, unlike Real Madrid\u2019s squad, learned all they ever need to learn.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even after Lucien Favre turned 60, he could still do things with a ball that left even some of European football’s brightest talents just a little awe-struck He could juggle it as well as any of the budding superstars under his tutelage at Borussia Dortmund. He had tricks up his sleeve that some of them had not yet mastered. He could join in a small-sided training game — alongside Erling Haaland and Jadon Sancho and the rest of his squad, almost all of them less than half his age —<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":23215,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[30,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23214"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23214"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23216,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23214\/revisions\/23216"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}