After eleven years of waiting, Borussia Dortmund returns to the Champions League final in spring 2024, the season in which it was least expected after the departures of Erling Haaland and Jude Bellingham, one of the many paradoxes of BVB.
Between July 2020 and July 2022, Borussia saw two of the current jewels of world football play under its colors: Norwegian center forward Erling Haaland and English midfielder Jude Bellingham. Two nuggets with which BVB dreamed of European glory, or at least triumph on the national scene to put an end to Bayern’s hegemony in the Bundesliga.
And yet, with Haaland and Bellingham, diamonds who were certainly still being polished in the Ruhr, Dortmund never reached the final four of the premier competition of European football. At most a quarter-final at the start of spring 2021, eliminated by two losses against Manchester City, and even an exit from the group stage in winter 2021. It was ultimately during the first season without its two superstars that Dortmund has long dreamed of a second European title after 1997.
He thus finished first in an extremely tough group, with Paris SG, AC Milan and Newcastle, then eliminated PSV Eindhoven, Atlético Madrid and PSG, to return to Wembley on June 1, as in 2013 when he had reached the C1 final for the second time.
Porous defense in the championship
“I was confronted with many parallels before this semi-final return to Paris. There is one that we have not yet talked about: the last time we were at Wembley, we were also 25 points behind the championship leader,” underlined Edin Terzic after his team’s qualification.
This is another BVB paradox. If he showed himself sparkling in the Champions League, he experienced the greatest difficulties in the Bundesliga to follow the crazy pace set by Bayer Leverkusen and Bayern Munich in the first leg, before the Munich residents in turn cracked in February.
Dortmund’s defense, impressively solid against PSG and accompanied by a huge success (saved six times by its uprights), has multiplied its errors in the championship. Only Darmstadt, promoted last season and already condemned to return to the lower tier, and Cologne, almost assured of the second division, failed to score a goal in the Bundesliga in Dortmund.
Finally, this qualification comes a year after the deep trauma of the last day of the 2022-23 Bundesliga, when BVB, leading by two points, missed a golden opportunity to win the German championship title, the first since 2012, and put an end to a decade of hegemony for Bayern in the Bundesliga.
