“I would say, without being arrogant, that I am quite intelligent. But there are many, many people who are extremely intelligent,” Nuri Sahin said six months ago, when he was still Edin Terzic’s assistant coach at Dortmund that ended up losing the Champions League final against Madrid. Today, at 36 years old, he is the first coach of the yellow team and steps into the Bernabéu (9:00 p.m., Movistar) as leader of the new Champions League (they won 0-3 against Bruges and 7-1 against Celtic), although with contradictory feelings for his day to day life in the Bundesliga. “Tomorrow [por este martes] “We want to show courage,” he announced in the preview.
A little over a decade ago, he became a hope for Madrid. In 2011, the club was looking for how to expand the midfield catalog and the one chosen to complement Xabi Alonso was Nuri Sahin, a solution that then seemed good, nice and cheap. Barely 10 million for a left-handed organizer with fine feet and an early career in Germany. But his knees, which were already damaged from his last stage at Borussia, went into a tailspin as soon as he signed and he was barely able to play 10 minor games. A hope that is too fleeting. The following season, with him on loan at Liverpool, Modric landed.
Miguel Pardeza, in the entity’s sports management at that time, remembers Sahin as “a good player”, although “somewhat fragile in mind.” “His case, like others, shows that success here is not just a matter of quality or talent. Character and personality matter as much or more,” he warns.
That campaign, 2011-12, stopped his growth and inaugurated a second part of his career with long falls to nursing; However, in the void of downtime on the stretcher he began to find motivation for the future. He began taking notes on football in 2013 and a serious injury in 2014, back at Dortmund, pushed him permanently to the bench. “I was away for a year. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I should do. “I fell in love with the tactical board,” he confessed last April in an interview in sky sportsthe same one in which he proclaimed his intelligence.
The start in the German 9th division
From the age of 26 he experimented in a team in the German ninth division, RSV Meinerzhagen, and he continued there even when he was able to play again, playing with the blackboard. A kind of personal laboratory that as of October 2021, with just turned 31, he transferred to professional football in Antalyaspor, a mid-table Turkish squad. He had arrived in 2020 as a player, but after a year he was left alone as a coach. He remained there until last January when he was recruited as Edin Terzic’s assistant.
His Dortmund team has lost several key players from the team that reached the European runners-up, such as Niclas Füllkrug, Marco Reus, Mats Hummels, Jadon Sancho and Ian Maatsen, and also has Adeyemi and Yan Couto injured. In return, he has found goals (seven) from Serhou Guirassy, a 1.87m forward who scored 30 goals with Stuttgart last season. “We are not 100%,” Nuri Sahin admitted this Monday in Spanish without frills but neat. “It’s normal. There is a new coach and new players. People like Hummels and Reus are no longer there. We have to go little by little, we have patience. I hope one day I can say that this is my team,” said the coach who in these first months has lamented that his Dortmund still does not offer the reliability of a large team every three days. The defense is being one of their weak flanks.
“The mentality will not be enough”
German by birth but Turkish by passport due to his family origins (on networks he publishes politically correct messages about Turkish national holidays and the exaltation of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, a great modernizing figure of Muslim countries), his early search for other horizons, pushed by the injuries, even led him to Harvard Business School, where in 2018 he was admitted to a sports management course. There he met former tennis player Andy Roddick, former skier Lindsey Vonn, and executives from Sony and Coca-Cola. “Gathering 80 smart people and brainstorming a topic changed my life,” he confessed.
During his first months at the helm of Dortmund, it has been known that he reads books and has attended seminars on leadership and motivation methods. He happens to be a direct guy in communication with the players, something he demonstrated very quickly. After losing 4-0 in a preseason match, he didn’t mess around. “I know the boys are tired and have trained a lot, but if they don’t do the basics, they won’t play. “It’s that simple,” he warned them in public.
Before going to sleep, he reviews each game again and, for now, what he sees falls short. “The mentality will not be enough to survive at the Bernabéu. We will also need a lot of quality,” concluded Sahin, who, despite the unpleasant sporting experience in Madrid, this Monday recalled that his first child was born in this city.