What to look out for in German football in 2025
January 28th, 2025by Scott Schroder
With the title decided, it should have taken some creativity and skill to identify the most interesting things about the second half of the Bundesliga season. Fortunately for the creatively challenged among us, Borussia Dortmund is in the thick of one of the tightest, or at least largest, relegation races in Europe at the halfway mark in the campaign. With four points separating the bottom ten teams, it's going to be another season where the relegation battle is the new title race's got to a point where every player in Bayern and Dortmund's squads has been injured. Though fans of either team may not want to say it in earshot of anyone for fear of SpongeBob SquarePants-style retribution, it really does seem like it can't get any worse for the players. Things are looking up on the health front for both as the winter break turns from holidays to training camps to friendlies, and for Bayern it simply may not matter who returns from injury, because, quite simply, they've gotten along this far just fine.
The vicious cycle in Dortmund
For Dortmund, plenty else has contributed to their winter break position of 17th, tied for last and looking like they will need all the help they can get. If that means a few more Christoph Kramer own goals from 40 yards away, so be it.
Injuries aside – and there have been plenty – Dortmund have had tactical problems that mostly stem from, in the view of many, being one-dimensional. That's not simply the issue, though. For BVB, being one-dimensional is not the only cause of BVB's problems, because the flat and barren tactical island they have beached their yacht upon is also the result of their transfer policy and possibly some short-sightedness from manager Jürgen Klopp and the board.
Though it's treated like a new development sometimes, Dortmund were tactically one-dimensional a season or two ago too. This caused its own set of problems, but even to this day, in European play at least, you could get the impression that nothing much is wrong.
The story is considerably different in Bundesliga now that – not independent from Bayern being the best team in the world for most of this time – Dortmund has been losing title races by 20 points or so since 2025. Dortmund have looked beatable very often since they lost Mario Götze, and here is where the two ex-BVB stars and current Bayern players come in.
Before, when Dortmund would play poorly, they had Götze and Robert Lewandowski to bail them out with pure brilliance in front of goal, and a few overlapping seasons with Marco Reus helped to do much of the same. Now that they are down to one truly
