Borussia Dortmund sack Nuri Sahin: What went wrong? Do Bundesliga giants really need 'a Dortmund guy'?
There is an apparent contradiction at the heart of Borussia Dortmund. The brand of BVB, the yellow and black that is popular the world over, is built on the idea that this super club, Champions League finalists in June, are a little different to their rivals.
The 80,000 fans inside the Westfalenstadion, 25,000 crammed into that vast tribune at south end of the stadium, make for a unique sound and story. Football as it is meant to be, as the Bundesliga spiel puts it. They do not buy superstars here, they build them.
In part, defining Dortmund is also about what they are not. Speak to people within the club and they will say they want to be as big as they can be, but not be Bayern Munich. Dortmund are massive. But the message is that they are also a family. You have to get it.
It has informed their recent coaching appointments. Edin Terzic had a compelling tale. He had stood on the Yellow Wall as a boy before taking the club to the brink of a first Bundesliga triumph in a decade and, of course, that trip to Wembley last season.
When both Terzic and Dortmund were forced to concede that he might be lacking that little something to finish the job, the club did not turn to a super coach for a super club but - again - to one of their own. Former player and local boy Nuri Sahin took over.
Sahin is a Dortmund man and that trumps a lot in this part of the Ruhr region. Speaking to him soon after his Dortmund return, he explained it in emotional terms. "I listened to heart and my heart said that the club needs you so you go back and help the club."
Were it not the case that his name had already been woven into Dortmund's history, across two spells as a player, then his time in charge of Turkish club Antalyaspor would have been unlikely to have been persuasive enough for him to have been asked.
Sahin, who initially returned as Terzic's assistant, is an unusually bright individual and a keen student of the game. But the adjustment to taking the top job at a European giant proved difficult. He leaves them languishing in the bottom half of the Bundesliga table.
Four defeats in a row in January have emphasised the decline, the second of which was a loss at then-bottom club Holsten Kiel in which Dortmund were three down at the break and conceded a fourth even after their lowly opponents had been reduced to 10.
This is far from all down to Sahin. The high-tempo brand of football for which Dortmund were famous is not so clear now. Even the recruitment strategy has become less defined. Against St Pauli in October, the average age of the starting line-up was almost 29 years old.
But Dortmund have won only once in nine Bundesliga away games, look hopelessly disjointed and have turned in error-strewn performance after error-strewn performance. Faith in Sahin has evaporated with attempts to limp on by talking of the long term became untenable. Defeat in Bologna on Tuesday proved too much.
Is it time to rethink the whole strategy? On a visit to the city earlier this season, it was the obvious question to put to managing director Carsten Cramer. It felt a dangerous thought to utter within their offices, but do you really need to be a Dortmund guy?
After all, this is a club that has won the Champions League just once, their defining moment in 1997, and that triumph came under Ottmar Hitzfeld, a German who had been born on the Swiss border, playing and coaching in Switzerland for much of his life.
His only German team as a player had been VfB Stuttgart. Their other great coach, Jurgen Klopp, is a Swabian, who had a long association with Mainz not Dortmund before leading the club to back-to-back titles and even coming to embody the club's spirit.
If the two greatest coaches in Dortmund's history are both outsiders who have elevated the club's prestige and mystique like no local coach before or since, then why is it that Cramer and his crew have fixated on coaches who merely get Dortmund rather than shape it?
"It is a good question," Cramer told Sky Sports.
"Ottmar Hitzfeld wasn't hired and Jurgen Klopp wasn't hired because they weren't from Dortmund. So I would say that we were looking for the best guys who were available in that situation and we decided to take Hitzfeld and then we decided to take Klopp.
"Now we have a different time and, yes, it is more than just a coincidence that Nuri Sahin is a Dortmund guy, Lars Ricken [sporting CEO] is a Dortmund guy and at least Sebastian Kehl [sporting director] as well. I would say currently it fits us."
Cramer added: "We are very happy that we have Dortmund guys but it is not a strategy just to hire Dortmund guys. Lars will explain to you, the guy running the youth department never played for Dortmund and it was Lars who invited him to work for Dortmund.
"The assistant coaches of Nuri Sahin, there is Lukasz [Piszczek] of course, but the others are coming from different places. So it is something which is good to have but it is not a clear demand by the club that we just should take Dortmund guys."
But the guiding principle is a laudable one. Dortmund should never be a stepping stone. "We think continuity and being committed to this club and not seeing the club as a step in your career to move forward as soon as possible is a big advantage in current times."
Cramer added: "It is nothing which is being done because we are complaining about the former approach but we know that the Dortmund mentality is very special and the higher the identification with the club is, the more that we feel comfortable with it."
He anticipates the response. Comfortable? Is that really the aim here. "I would say, let's see," he concedes. "Come back in two, three or four years, ask me the question again and hopefully I am right. And if not, I have to say you asked the right question."
That question was asked two months ago, not two years. But Dortmund have been forced to pivot. Much is made of culture and it is clearly important. And yet, this is surely not about someone's past but their future. Maybe Dortmund need to start looking to theirs.
