Despite Borussia Dortmund’s pedigree, I don’t believe Newcastle United have anything to fear…
I saw the Borussia Dortmund team bus driving up St James Boulevard last night, and there were already a few Germans in town.
Things will gradually pick up today, and I expect the atmosphere to crack this evening.
I prepared an article before our memorable triumph over PSG to attempt to capture who we were up against, and I’ve done the same with Dortmund.
In 1909, the Ballspielverein Borussia 09 e. V. Dortmund, also known as Borussia Dortmund or just Dortmund, was created.
The football team is a member of a huge sports club with around 145,000 members. Borussia Dortmund has played their home games at Westfalenstadion since 1974. The stadium is Germany’s largest, and Borussia Dortmund boasts the world’s greatest average attendance of any association football club.
Dortmund’s formation was peculiar. It was created by a group of young men who were dissatisfied with the Catholic church-sponsored Trinity Youth, where they played football under the watchful eye of the local parish priest, Father Dewald. When the organisers met in a local tavern to plan the formation of the new group, the priest was barred from entering!
While the name Borussia is Latin meaning Prussia, it was derived from the adjacent Borussia brewery’s Borussia beer. The team started the game wearing blue and white striped jerseys with a red ribbon and black shorts. They wore the characteristic black and yellow stripes in 1913.
Along with his anti-religious feelings, Borussia’s president had little time for the Third Reich and was forced to resign when he refused to join the Nazi Party. Furthermore, in the latter days of the war, a couple of members who secretly used the club’s offices to publish anti-Nazi literature were executed.
In the present day, the club has continued the good fight by establishing the leuchte auf charity trust, which provides financial assistance to key social projects. The logo of the trust is a star formed by the streets that intersect at Dortmund’s Borsigplatz, where the club was founded. In recent years, significant causes have included raising donations to assist victims of the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami, as well as extensive floods in Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt in 2013. Borussia Dortmund, together with Bayern Munich, RB Leipzig, and Bayer Leverkusen, provided financial aid to Bundesliga teams in need during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Borussia Dortmund has had a lot of success on the field. The Bundesliga was founded in 1963, but Dortmund has won it five times, the first time in 1995. It could have been six, but a 2-2 home draw against Mainz on the penultimate day of last season cost them dearly as Bayern Munich won their eleventh successive Bundesliga title.
Of course, Borussia Dortmund are no strangers to the Champions League. They qualified for the Champions League for the twelfth time in thirteen years this season, and they won the competition in 1997, defeating Juventus 3-1. They won the Intercontinental Cup Final 2-0 over Brazilian team Cruzeiro to become world club champions.
So, once again, we face tough opponents with lots of European pedigree at St James’ Park.
We have nothing to fear, as we did when we batted the Parisians aside.
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