The decline is creeping up

It’s not like there wasn’t any good news for and from Borussia Mönchengladbach at the weekend. The club’s U23s, who recently slowly but surely slipped close to the relegation ranks in the Regionalliga West, stopped their series of defeats after seven bankruptcies in a row. Your game is down.

Borussia Mönchengladbach fans have to enjoy the little things these days. The big ones are more of a cause for concern. Just one week after the highest derby defeat against 1. FC Köln in a quarter of a century, the highest home defeat in more than half a century followed on Sunday evening. In the end it was 0: 6 against SC Freiburg. It was 0: 6 after 37 minutes. There has never been anything like it in the history of the Bundesliga.
Borussia Mönchengladbach has gained a lot of recognition in the past ten years, has worked its way up from an eternal relegation candidate to the better society of German football. But for the club it is by no means a matter of course to belong to this elite circle. The people of Gladbach do not belong to him by origin (and also not by financial strength). They belong to him because they have done a lot right in the past few years. Or less wrong than many of their competitors.
At the moment you can’t be so sure about that anymore. And since football fans reliably commute between extremes, there are some of those from Gladbach who see their club on the way back to being irrelevant. The time was great … This concern is as exaggerated as it is well founded.

Exaggerated because the club still has a lot of substance; Justified because the decay does not start overnight, but is a creeping process that initially manifests itself in small details before the signs can no longer be overlooked.

The team lacks the inner drive

There were already warning signals last season when the Gladbach team lost a total of 27 points after taking a tour because the team, at that time still under the guidance of Marco Rose, made the same mistakes over and over again. The team lacks the inner drive to assert itself against resistance. Other clubs – Union, Mainz, Cologne, Freiburg, even promoted Bochum – are now much better at this.

When it gets uncomfortable, the Gladbachers have nothing more to add. Then they just let things go and go along with their fate. That was already the case under Rose when they lost 4-0 to the Austrian no-name team Wolfsberger AC in the Europa League in their own stadium, and that was no different on Sunday, in the 6-0 win against Freiburg under Rose’s successor Adi Hütter.
That’s why it’s not a contradiction in terms that the same team dismantled the great FC Bayern 5-0 a few weeks ago. There is still sufficient quality in the team, and when things go well, like against Bayern, then things go well.

Gladbach’s problem is not that the team lacks quality; Gladbach’s problem is that the team relies solely on their quality. It is enough to meet her with pronounced intensity, with greed and passion, to cause her difficulties that are apparently beyond control. That doesn’t bode well for Advent. In the last three games of this year, Gladbach will meet Leipzig, Frankfurt and Hoffenheim. So on teams that are known for: greed, intensity and passion.