Edin Terzic has left Borussia Dortmund by mutual consent.
It has been in the wind. Terzic leaves the club after two years in permanent charge, having almost won the 2022-23 Bundesliga and despite, just two weeks ago, reaching a Champions League final. As an interim head coach in 2021, he won the DFB-Pokal (the German Cup).
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But those are headlines. The harder truth is that Terzic’s Dortmund have often been slow, purposeless and defensively flawed. They have been disjointed, too, which is so at odds with the club’s technical standard. Dortmund see themselves as a raging underdog. They have been nothing close to that for some time, other than in the Champions League, during which Dortmund were often heroic.
In the Champions League, they defended and played with a spirit true to the club’s image, contrasting so drastically with their Bundesliga performances that it defied explanation. The wins over Atletico Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain and Newcastle United will be remembered for decades, as will the defiance against Real Madrid in the final — but those memories do not line up easily with the era in which they occurred.
In this season’s Bundesliga, without a star player in the weight class of Jude Bellingham or Erling Haaland, Dortmund have been incredibly disappointing. They enjoy considerable financial advantages over every Bundesliga team other than Bayern Munich. They have its second-highest wage bill, but a fifth-place finish was as underwhelming as it was deserved.
For Terzic, it was also deeply inconvenient. While his supporters talk about a coach who forms strong bonds with players, particularly the young ones, and who has given talented individuals the latitude and freedom to develop, his critics have always focused on his need for face-saving moments of inspiration.
Hero football: that is the phrase that has stalked him. More recently, hero football without heroes. It accuses Terzic of only being as effective as the talent pool allows. Whether or not that is fair is another issue. The fact that Dortmund sank to fifth in the season immediately after Bellingham’s sale gives the theory credence.
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But to examine this period purely through the narrow lens of what happened on the pitch neglects the wider context. Dortmund is not a harmonious club. For all the cheerful marketing that the public saw in London and the wonderful support at Wembley, there have been divisions and disagreements for some time.
Hans-Joachim Watzke, CEO since 2005, will leave in 2025. Lars Ricken, the former midfielder and someone to whom Terzic has been close for many years, inherited the sporting side of Watzke’s responsibilities in May 2024. Watzke has been Terzic’s keenest ally and his departure was always likely to impact job stability. Whether the relationship between Terzic and Ricken is the same is unclear.
The lack of alignment between Terzic and Sebastian Kehl, the sporting director, is better understood. He and Kehl disagreed about the club’s transfer activity last summer. One of Kehl’s assistants, Slaven Stanic, left the club in December 2023 after just six months in the role. The club have denied rumours of a falling out between Stanic and Terzic and insist his departure occurred on good terms. That Stanic issued a statement saying he could not perform his role because “integrity, respect and trust are valuable” to him implied otherwise.
The Champions League run was gloss for these issues. It was also a series of performances for which Terzic had varying degrees of responsibility.
In December 2023, he came close to losing his job. The club chose to retain him, but addressing a sluggish attack and a defence that had conceded the most goals by that stage of the season in 15 years, they reconfigured the coaching staff. They appointed Nuri Sahin and Sven Bender, former Dortmund players, and tasked each with reinvigorating a different part of the side — Sahin with the attack, Bender with the defence. The pair moved to the front of the coaching team, with Terzic taking a more overseeing role in training sessions.
The effects were good. Dortmund’s form after those changes were made during the winter break was excellent. There were seven straight games without defeat but the aesthetics were difficult and, publicly at least, appeared to erode Terzic’s agency. It was the right decision — Terzic recommended both coaches to the board — but for a figure whose impact was already under suspicion with some supporters and media, it was hardly helpful image-wise.
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Part of the attrition came from within. Marco Reus, the enormously popular, long-serving forward, grew disaffected with his lack of playing time in the first half of the season. Reus, in the imagination of the German media, took on the role of mutineer, with Terzic having to regularly bat away questions about a feud.
Most recently — ridiculously— 35-year-old centre-back Mats Hummels gave an interview on the eve of the Champions League final where he made clear criticisms of Terzic’s style of play. Hummels pointedly praised the effect of Sahin and Bender, noting the improvement since their arrival, but said that the way Dortmund had played in certain Bundesliga games last season, particularly against Stuttgart and Bayer Leverkusen, had been unbefitting of the club.
Hummels played for Jurgen Klopp between 2009 and 2015. It was a spectacular era and, whether reasonable or not, it is the one against which all future Dortmund teams have been measured. Hummels’ timing was poor and he is known for being outspoken, but he was inadvertently drawing the same comparison many others have: that this Dortmund, Terzic’s Dortmund, was not worthy.
In the aftermath, Terzic was asked about the Hummels interview in a Wembley press conference the night before the Champions League final. It changed the mood in the room. First, Terzic said he had not read the whole interview. Then, he revealed that he and Hummels had spoken about it. Everyone sitting in the auditorium knew that it could not possibly be both, and journalists shifted awkwardly in their seats.
Whatever the content of that discussion, it was then clear that Terzic and Hummels, whose contract expires this summer, were not going to be in the same place next season.
The misconception will be of Dortmund and Edin Terzic stumbling suddenly to this mutual decision. Truthfully, they have been trudging towards it for some time. Terzic has had good moments and bad. He has received criticism that has been too harsh and reprieves he might not have deserved. No doubt this is a sad day, because his job evidently meant a great deal to him, but his aesthetic suitability — the local boy made good, the fan who became head coach — disguised that this has been an uneasy, awkward marriage for a long time.
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(Top photo: Alexander Hassenstein via Getty Images)