\n<\/p>\n
In those few minutes after Niclas F\u00fcllkrug had scored, as the Yellow Wall swayed and roared, Borussia Dortmund must have felt the stirring of some distant memory. Waves of attacks pounded down on Paris St.-Germain, now dizzied and wearied. The world shimmered with possibility. A place in the Champions League final felt, for a moment, close enough to touch.<\/p>\n
This is how it used to be, or at least some approximation of it, back in the days when Dortmund made Europe shake. Gregor Kobel, the team\u2019s goalkeeper, was pulling off daring turns in his own penalty area. Mats Hummels, a fixture in the lineup a decade ago, was spraying languid passes with the outside of his foot. Jadon Sancho and Karim Adeyemi were electric, relentless.<\/p>\n
There is a chance, of course, that it will all count for nothing. More than a chance, really: Dortmund may live to regret that a second goal never came. P.S.G. had enough opportunities to hint at its threat, too, hitting the post twice in the space of 10 seconds at one point. It may not prove quite so forgiving in the return leg in Paris on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
But that Dortmund will travel to France with hope \u2014 perhaps even with a little expectation \u2014 is still an unanticipated development. This was supposed, after all, to be a chastening week for German soccer: Most expected Dortmund and Bayern Munich, the Bundesliga\u2019s two great crisis clubs, to be exposed in the Champions League semifinals. And yet, halfway through, both teams remain vividly alive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Dortmund\u2019s case was the more extreme. The club has spent much of this season engaged in a bout of restive soul-searching. Dortmund\u2019s coach, Edin Terzic, has been under such scrutiny for so long that it is probably fair to assume he has memorized the password to his H.R. portal. The club enters this weekend languishing in fifth place in the Bundesliga, its form patchy, its progress stalled.<\/p>\n
The disappointment has been compounded by the fact that, for the first time in more than a decade, Bayern Munich will not be the champion of Germany. The problem is that nor will Borussia Dortmund. Bayer Leverkusen, instead, has stepped up<\/a>, a fairy-tale success story that reads like a searing critique at Dortmund\u2019s Signal Iduna Park, crystallizing a sense of waywardness, of lost purpose, that has been festering for some time.<\/p>\n Dortmund\u2019s modern identity has long been that it is the club of tomorrow<\/a>. This was best symbolized by the Footbonaut: the $1 million machine Dortmund installed to improve its players\u2019 technique and reaction time \u2014 and which now seems like a brief and fleeting folly even if, for a time, it was considered the definition of cutting edge.<\/p>\n So, too, was Dortmund. This was the forge of soccer\u2019s next generation<\/a>, the place where the names you needed to know next were made. Two of its alumni \u2014 Ousmane Demb\u00e9l\u00e9 and Achraf Hakimi \u2014 returned to the city in P.S.G.\u2019s colors on Wednesday, but there is at least one at almost every major team in Europe now. Jude Bellingham, Erling Haaland, Ilkay Gundogan and Robert Lewandowski, among many others, all rolled off the club\u2019s production line.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Dortmund was also where ideas were generated, the club that nurtured J\u00fcrgen Klopp and Thomas Tuchel, and introduced their gospels to the world. Dortmund was cast (not entirely accurately) as the spiritual home of and perfect showroom for the style known as gegenpressing, that distinctively German school of thought that has long since been orthodoxy for any team worth its salt.<\/p>\n In recent years, though, that reputation has drifted. Dortmund \u2014 like Bayern, like German soccer as a whole \u2014 is in many ways a small-c conservative sort of a place. Change comes neither easily nor naturally. There is comfort in the familiar, in the tried and tested. Revolution has always been a last resort.<\/p>\n How it has attempted to address its mounting travails is a case in point. Terzic himself was appointed initially as a sort of ersatz Klopp, a lifelong fan and one-time prot\u00e9g\u00e9 handed the reins initially on an interim basis. When his permanent successor faltered, the club brought him back full time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n When the club decided the cast of prodigies it had assembled to repeat the trick of Klopp\u2019s greatest team<\/a> required a little more experience, a touch more grizzle, it turned to Hummels, restoring him to the team. Mario G\u00f6tze, another hero from the old days, had previously been granted a homecoming, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In January, with its season on the brink, Dortmund offered Jadon Sancho his own return, and an escape from Manchester United. Terzic, at the same time, also added two new (old) faces to his coaching staff: Nuri Sahin and Sven Bender, both of them relatively recent former players. Dortmund\u2019s operating principle appears to be that, no matter the question, the answer can be found in the past.<\/p>\n The effect has been to turn Dortmund into a tribute act to itself, a club not quite ready to see what tomorrow might bring, a team forever chasing yesterday. Given their rivalry, it is ironic that this is precisely the sort of thing that Bayern Munich typically does.<\/p>\n Bayern\u2019s modern empire, after all, has been constructed by a coterie of former players, all of them appointed to various executive roles as an expression of the club\u2019s avowed belief that they were the only people who possessed the institutional knowledge to guide such a demanding \u2014 and skittish \u2014 behemoth.<\/p>\n But under their auspices, Bayern\u2019s squad has been allowed to grow old, the club just a little stale, and now there is an acceptance that something more radical is required. Bayern Munich had been contemplating handing control of its fate to Ralf Rangnick, soccer\u2019s chosen midwife to modernity. He turned down Bayern\u2019s approach<\/a> on Thursday, but that he was being considered illustrates the club\u2019s awareness that something more transformational than it might ordinarily tolerate is overdue.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It would be easy \u2014 a reflex, really \u2014 to claim that both Dortmund and Bayern should have seen this coming, to suggest that the warning signs were there and to condemn their resistance to change as a form of na\u00efve romanticism, or craven short-termism, or bloated self-satisfaction.<\/p>\n This week, though, has provided a rather neat encapsulation of why soccer as a whole, in Germany as much as outside it, finds change so hard to countenance.<\/p>\n On Tuesday, Bayern\u2019s apparently ragtag bunch of veterans and mediocrities (and Harry Kane) came within a whisker of beating Real Madrid, the Allianz Arena bouncing and heaving as Germany\u2019s great heavyweight found its range. A day later, there were moments when it felt as if Dortmund might overpower P.S.G., nation-state funding be damned. Not bad, for two teams supposedly trapped in their own pasts.<\/p>\n That may be the high point, of course. Next week might bring a return to more familiar territory. The need for change, and the causes of it, are not erased by a single, thrilling performance. But the borders between one era and the next are not always neat, or clear. Instead, they are often blurred and indistinct. Time marches on. But there are moments, for all teams, when it does feel as if the clocks have turned back.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n One area in which Bayern Munich cannot be accused of being frightened of change is in its jersey.<\/p>\n Most teams regard the format, if not the precise design, of their home jersey as sacrosanct. Barcelona plays in blue and red. Real Madrid is all white. Chelsea is royal blue, Manchester City sky, Borussia Dortmund crossing-guard yellow.<\/p>\n That does not stop any of them from releasing a new edition every season, obviously: Those customers are not going to milk themselves. But the changes tend to be minor, even superficial. A Juventus or an Arsenal or an Atl\u00e9tico Madrid jersey is still instantly recognizable. This is one of those areas where tradition and brand awareness achieve perfect synergy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Bayern Munich, though, has played in white this season, with what is probably called \u2014 in the trade \u2014 a red trim. In recent years, it has released shirts that are red, red with horizontal white stripes, red with vertical white stripes, red and blue stripes, among others. There have been so many varietals that it is hard to remember what a Bayern home jersey is meant to look like anymore.<\/p>\n This is clearly a source of discontent for the club\u2019s ultras. On Tuesday, the Sudkurve of the Allianz Arena unfurled a banner \u2014 one of many, admittedly \u2014 detailing the fans\u2019 belief that Bayern\u2019s colors should be red and white, in that order, and no other. On this subject, it is hard to find fault with their argument. There are some traditions that should be maintained.<\/p>\n There would be rather more awareness that the Premier League is facing a period of radical change if the nature of those changes was not, ultimately, quite so boring. It is hard to get too worked up about the British government trying to introduce a regulator because of the presence of the word \u201cregulator.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nTackling the Major Issues of the Day, Part 827<\/h2>\n
The Usual Suspects: Lyon vs. Barcelona<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Bunk<\/h2>\n