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I mean, of course Borussia Dortmund fired Lucien Favre. How else do you respond to ... [retreats slowly, tries to turn his head away but his eyes keep darting back in the other direction, opens both of his hands and just sort of points his arms and palms in a general direction] ... this:
Dortmund had 71 percent of the ball and somehow were outshot, 18 to 12. Lopsided, misaligned metrics like that usually belie some deeper, structural issue -- a team that can’t defend, that passes the ball because it can’t do anything else -- and per FBRef data, Dortmund created just 0.8 expected goals worth of chances while conceding 3.9. The average Bundesliga match contains about 3.0 xG total; that was the gulf between Favre’s team and Stuttgart. It’s the kind of performance you might see when a super-team goes up a man during the first half at home against a relegation side. But not this one: Dortmund are the super-team, they had all 11 players for all 90 minutes, they were at home, and Stuttgart were the ones who spent last season playing in the second-division.
It wasn’t just one game, either. In a year where the normally unbeatable Bayern Munich look normal and beatable, Dortmund have lost four of their opening 11 matches. They’re in fifth; the four teams ahead of them have two losses, combined. Toss in the fact that it’s a weird, compressed, pandemic-haunted year and that Dortmund hung onto all of their stars over the summer, and there’s no reason this team couldn’t be a legitimate Champions League contender, too.
That’s all still in play, of course. Dortmund are through to the Round of 16, and they’ll be significant favorites to advance past Sevilla. Plus, they’re only six points back of first-place Bayer Leverkusen (coached by former Dortmund boss Peter Bosz) and five points behind Bayern and RB Leipzig in second. If the season can still be salvaged, then you need a manager who can salvage it. But who’s to say that Favre himself couldn’t be the one to do it?
It might be one thing if Dortmund were cutting ties with Favre, whose contract is up after the season, to bring in some top-class available manager ASAP but reporting seems to suggest that they’re gonna ride the season out with one of Favre’s assistants, Erdin Terzic, as interim manager. Now, an interim-turned-permanent manager, Hansi Flick, won the Bundesliga and the Champions League last year, but that’s the exception that proves the rule.
And it might be another thing if Dortmund were churning out underwhelming performances and results like the Stuttgart match, week after week, but that just hasn’t been the case. In fact, even when accounting for the Stuttgart shellacking, Dortmund have the tied-for-third-best non-penalty expected-goal differential in Europe’s Big Five leagues.
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What you’ll also notice: no team in Germany is ahead of them! Now, 11 games is still a pretty small sample of matches, but before the Stuttgart match, Dortmund would’ve been first on this list. No one in Europe had done a better aggregate job of creating chances and preventing them than Dortmund. In fact, per Stats Perform, the Stuttgart match was the first Bundesliga game of the season in which Dortmund didn’t create more expected goals than their opponent. And against Bayern, Dortmund outshot the eight-time-defending champs and doubled-up their chance quality. Of course, they still lost:
On the whole, everything else about Dortmund looked pretty healthy, too. They weren’t creating a tiny number of chances off tight-rope-walking counters or pouncing on unforced defensive mistakes. No, they took 65 percent of the shots in their matches, bettered only by Manchester City, Roma, and Napoli. They completed 20 passes into the penalty area per match, bettered only by Bayern and Barcelona. They completed 67 percent of the final-third passes in their matches, bettered only by City, Bayern, and Barca. And they averaged 41 sequences (an uninterrupted possession) starting in the attacking third per match, bettered by only Barca, Bayern, and Liverpool. Under Favre this season, Dortmund were playing like an elite team -- despite rolling out a roster filled with guys who don’t even remember just how weird the whole Y2K thing was. The kids were crushing it:
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In addition to all their young talent, the main way Dortmund stood out is in how slow they were with the ball. They advanced possession up the field at 1.06 meters per second -- tied with (eek) Arsenal and faster than only Southampton and Serie A’s 16th-place team, Spezia. Given all that, it’s interesting to see center back Mats Hummels’s comments from after the Stuttgart match: "Unfortunately, we only take risks in spaces where the gain is fairly small but defensive consequences can be huge”. In a way, he’s right: passing the ball around in your own defensive third seems like it holds little pay-off for the team with the ball and plenty of opportunity for the team that can win it back.
Except, this is a staple of Favre’s tactics. His teams have all seemed to prioritize this defensive-third possession both as a means of keeping their opponents off the ball and also luring them out to create space to eventually attack into. Despite averaging the slowest average possessions in Germany over the past two-plus seasons, they’ve also created 10.3 percent of their expected goals from fast breaks -- second behind just Bayer Leverkusen.
This seemingly contradictory style of play -- slow, slow, slow, slow, BAM -- does something that the xG models can’t pick up. Over his 349 domestic matches in charge at Hertha Berlin, Borussia Mönchengladbach, Nice, and Dortmund since 2018, Favre’s teams scored 582 goals against 482.9 expected and conceded 409 goals against 446.2 expected. At both ends of the field, his teams outperformed their underlying numbers by a significant margin. That’s four different sets of players across two different leagues; the Favre effect is real.
However, most managers really just don’t have much of an effect on a team’s long-term performance, one way or the other. The overall talent level at the club -- and roughly, a team’s wages -- is what actually pushes winning forward. But there are a few coaches with a long-enough track-record of affecting improved results, and Favre really might be one of them.
An Economist study from 2019 used FIFA ratings to predict a team’s performance -- don’t laugh; it works! -- and then awarded any over- or under-performance to the manager. Based on this, they predicted that Favre would improve the next team he coaches by 3.76 points -- more than any other coach working today.
Now, maybe the situation at Dortmund had become untenable; Hummels and club captain Marco Reus were both openly critical of the way the team has played. And maybe the Stuttgart performance wasn’t just an outlier but an indicator of what was to come. But if you zoom out just a tiny bit further, then everything else -- Dortmund’s recent past, Favre’s coaching career -- suggests that this team was likely to start racking up results that matched -- or exceeded -- their elite chance-creation. Instead, at least for the rest of this season, the club is now banking on an untested coach to both keep the team performing at the same underlying level and, more importantly, convert those performances into results that match. Soon enough, someone else is gonna hire Favre to do the exact same thing.
All stats via Stats Perform unless otherwise noted.
