Soccer – Frankfurt am Main – Deep in the West: The West German clubs in the permanent crisis – Sport

Düsseldorf (dpa / lnw) – One half is panting after the hoped-for Champions League place, the other half forms the relegation zone: In the west, all six football first division clubs are currently in a permanent crisis mood. The heart of football literally beats deep in the west. Of the 18 Bundesliga clubs, six – and thus a third – are currently from North Rhine-Westphalia. And in the European Cup, the NRW clubs even made up half of this season with three out of six starters. But both numbers could drop significantly in the coming season.

As of now, Borussia Dortmund, Bayer Leverkusen and Borussia Mönchengladbach are all missing out on the Champions League and maybe even the European Cup. The completely crashed FC Schalke 04, Arminia Bielefeld and 1. FC Köln occupy the last three places and are acutely threatened with relegation. Dortmund, Bielefeld and on Tuesday also Leverkusen have already swapped coaches, the fifth coach is already working in Schalke. Marco Rose in Gladbach and Markus Gisdol recently wobbled heavily. Is that a coincidence in this breadth? The German Press Agency gives reasons:

THE GHOST GAMES: The Bundesliga has been playing without spectators for around a year. The number of home wins has fallen since then, but especially in the West. Where the heart beats, emotions play a special role. Dortmund with the largest stadium in the league, Schalke with the fourth largest and Gladbach and Cologne as number six and eight with at least 50,000 spectators each suffer particularly from the lack of fans. All in all, the six NRW clubs won only 23 home wins by the 26th matchday, but lost 37 times in their own stadium. Last year there were 42 wins against 27 defeats. The average value has fallen for each individual club, overall considerably from an average of 1.62 points to 1.11 per game.

THE DOUBLE BURDEN: In a season without a winter break and with an even tighter schedule than usual, the European Cup is really what complainers like to call it: A double burden. Although the results after the European Cup weeks are not broadly worse, there are fluctuations. Dortmund, for example, only won three out of eight games, including twice against the losers from Schalke. At the same time, BVB also lost three times. Among other things, the two bitterest defeats of the season at home against Cologne (1: 2) and Stuttgart (1: 5) fell in weeks after the Champions League.

INJURY PECH: It may be an even clearer consequence of the great stress in this particular year. In any case, important players fell out of numerous clubs. And the western clubs could hardly start this. In Dortmund, among others, captain Marco Reus and Jadon Sancho, Axel Witsel have been missing for a long time. In Leverkusen there were three cruciate ligament injuries, one fibula fracture and one Achilles tendon injury, plus seven corona cases. Cologne plays a large part of the season without a trained striker, not only because of poor personnel planning.

AND OTHERWISE? The western clubs are also not very successful in the 2nd and 3rd leagues. In the lower house, table leaders Bochum is the exception, the relegated Düsseldorf and Paderborn are far away from the promotion places. In the third division, the ambitious clubs Duisburg, Uerdingen and Viktoria Köln are only against relegation. Here climber Verl alone surprises positively. A shift of the forces in NRW is unlikely because of the width of the depression. At most, the question of whether Schalke will replace Bochum as the second force in the pot is exciting. But definitely not to be answered for a few years.

© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210323-99-933736 / 4

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