Bundesliga Week 13: What's wrong with Borussia Dortmund?

A slight digression from the football league for just one post this week.

Possibly the biggest story in European football this weekend was Borussia Dortmund’s fall to bottom of the Bundesliga.
Given the team’s massive support, substantial recent success and as being one of the few real challengers to Bayern Munich over recent years, it is not surprising this has been big news.
This is even more so with Jurgen Klopp’s high profile and rumours of interest from Premier League clubs.
All of that has led to some rather strong (almost gleeful) attacks at Klopp and his reputation.

So here’s the Bundesliga table, not very pretty reading for Dortmund fans:

Position	Team	Played	Won	Drawn	Lost	Goals For	Goals Against	Goal Difference	Points
1	Bayern Munich	13	10	3	0	32	3	29	33
2	Wolfsburg	13	8	2	3	25	12	13	26
3	Leverkusen	13	6	5	2	25	17	8	23
4	Augsburg	13	7	0	6	18	13	5	21
5	M'gladbach	13	5	5	3	16	10	6	20
6	Schalke 04	13	6	2	5	21	18	3	20
7	Hoffenheim	13	5	5	3	21	21	0	20
8	Hannover	13	6	1	6	13	18	-5	19
9	Ein Frankfurt	13	5	3	5	22	24	-2	18
10	Mainz	13	3	7	3	16	18	-2	16
11	Paderborn	13	4	4	5	18	22	-4	16
12	FC Koln	13	4	3	6	13	18	-5	15
13	Hertha	13	4	2	7	17	23	-6	14
14	Werder Bremen	13	3	4	6	18	26	-8	13
15	Freiburg	13	2	6	5	14	20	-6	12
16	Stuttgart	13	3	3	7	18	27	-9	12
17	Hamburg	13	3	3	7	7	17	-10	12
18	Dortmund	13	3	2	8	14	21	-7	11

But let’s have a look at the underlying stats to see if we can pick out anything that’s going wrong at Dortmund.

Can anyone spot the problem?
(Incidentally, this graph was plotted on my standard dimensions for this and so dominant have Bayern been that they don’t fit on it in EITHER direction!)

So yeah, Dortmund’s PDO is so low they barely fit on the graph. It's just brutal.
I’ve not really seen much of Dortmund this season, so can’t comment too much on whether this is a systems thing of just sheer bad luck, but it’s highly unlikely that the PDO stays THIS low for the rest of the season.
Given how dominant Dortmund are in terms of shots, Klopp's assessment that it’s pretty well governed by bad luck is fairly pragmatic, even sensible, approach to take.

Being a smaller league and shorter season though means teams are much more vulnerable to being devastated by short term slumps like this over the course of a season.
Dortmund’s title hopes are (one would imagine) pretty much shot now, but if they get a rebound of PDO as strong as the fall has been and they could yet challenge for a Champions League spot.
The rest of their underlying numbers are good enough – a sparkling shot share (Corsi/TSR) of 64.4% (third behind Bayern’s 72.7% and Leverkusen’s 69.2%) is testament to that.


The problem is that current second place team Wolfsberg are doing a pretty tidy job themselves too. If they can make up the 12 point gap on Leverkusen in third that would be a remarkable end to the season – though Klopp’s employers may just settle for avoiding relegation at the moment.

Position	Team	Shots for total	Shots against total	Corsi/TSR	shots on target for total	shots on target against total	Shots on target share	Shooting % For	Save %	PDO
1	Bayern Munich	240	90	0.727	99	33	0.75	32.33	90.91	123.23
2	Wolfsburg	215	143	0.601	89	53	0.627	28.08	77.36	105.44
3	Leverkusen	245	109	0.692	75	46	0.62	33.33	63.02	96.35
4	Augsburg	177	166	0.516	60	56	0.517	29.99	76.78	106.77
5	M'gladbach	163	207	0.441	63	74	0.46	25.39	86.48	111.88
6	Schalke 04	132	222	0.373	61	74	0.452	34.44	75.68	110.12
7	Hoffenheim	190	177	0.518	63	55	0.534	33.32	61.83	95.15
8	Hannover	138	174	0.443	51	53	0.491	25.48	66.03	91.5
9	Ein Frankfurt	170	176	0.491	74	82	0.474	29.72	70.73	100.46
10	Mainz	150	201	0.427	53	80	0.399	30.19	77.5	107.68
11	Paderborn	170	190	0.472	56	68	0.452	32.14	67.66	99.79
12	FC Koln	116	191	0.378	47	66	0.416	27.67	72.72	100.39
13	Hertha	132	156	0.458	48	55	0.466	35.43	58.19	93.62
14	Werder Bremen	151	199	0.431	66	60	0.524	27.26	56.67	83.93
15	Freiburg	147	173	0.459	60	67	0.472	23.33	70.16	93.48
16	Stuttgart	157	200	0.44	54	85	0.389	33.33	68.23	101.56
17	Hamburg	150	168	0.472	40	65	0.381	17.5	73.84	91.34
18	Dortmund	222	123	0.644	68	55	0.553	20.58	61.82	82.4