How Borussia Dortmund Should Have Spent Their 2016 Summer Transfer Window Money

One of the many perks the winter break, a month-long hiatus from competitive football, offers German clubs is the opportunity to self-evaluate processes and decisions.

Of course, this is mostly an internal procedure and thus closed to the public, unless the results of this assessment make a drastic move inevitable, be it a coaching change or the instalment of a new sporting director.

For Borussia Dortmund, the self-evaluation between the end of the first half of the season and the start of the preparations for the rest of the campaign will not call for such poignant decisions. The Black and Yellows return to the training pitch on January 3 and begin their training camp in Marbella, Spain, two days later, per the club’s official website.

Still, the club’s decision-makers will assess the first months of the season and not be overly impressed with the team’s performances. More than anything, a lack of consistency has haunted the Ruhr side, not least because myriad injuries has taken its toll.

The root cause for most of Dortmund’s problems, however, can probably be located in the summer transfer window, when the club faced the impossible situation of having to replace three of the team’s best and most important players in Mats Hummels, Ilkay Gundogan and Henrikh Mkhitaryan.

At the time, the Black and Yellows were widely praised for their reaction to those losses, with Squawka.com going as far as calling them “the undisputed kings of the transfer market.”

Dortmund’s summer acquisitions held up reasonably well when Bleacher Report graded their performances through the first half of the season, but few would argue that the club could have done even better in the summer.

Their failure to sign a true replacement for Gundogan was noted as a glaring omission by this writer in September, while the last months have shown Dortmund could also have used a new back-up goalkeeper and another centre-back.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but chances are the Ruhr side would have played a stronger first half of the season had they not left themselves vulnerable in those three spots.

With that in mind, here, B/R takes a look at how Dortmund should have spent their money in the summer.

We will look only at players who moved clubs in the transfer window and only consider transfers that would have seemed realistic at the time—no cheating with Zlatan Ibrahimovic on a free!

                      

Budget

Dortmund spent €109.75 million on transfers in the summer, and to a large degree, that was money well spent. Marc Bartra, Ousmane Dembele, Raphael Guerreiro, Mario Gotze and Emre Mor were good signings for a combined sum of €64 million.

However, their three other signings, Mikel Merino, Sebastian Rode and Andre Schurrle, have so far not paid dividends.

Merino has only played in three matches. Rode looks a rare bad signing, as this writer detailed in an earlier piece, and does not seem to have a natural position within Dortmund’s system.

Schurrle, while he has played OK, was too expensive as the club’s record signing and always seemed more of a luxury transfer who would not improve Dortmund’s starting XI if everyone was available for any given match.

We would argue the €45.75 million Dortmund invested in these three players could have been spent more intelligently in the following positions and on the players mentioned.

                       

Back-Up Goalkeeper: Ron-Robert Zieler, €3.5 million

Dortmund did not identify their second goalkeeper behind regular starter Roman Burki a position of need in the summer, never once being linked in earnest with a new signing for the spot between the sticks.

Thirty-six-year-old veteran Roman Weidenfeller, however, has shown his age since Burki broke his hand against Bayern Munich. Dortmund’s long-term No. 1 played well against Real Madrid in the Champions League and won his side a penalty shootout against Union Berlin in the DFB-Pokal earlier in the season, but Father Time has caught up to him, and he has become a liability.

While it is unfair to pin it all on the 2014 FIFA World Cup winner, the fact is he has conceded a whopping 13 goals in …

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