The Daily Bee (February 22nd, 2019): Watzke sees “room for improvement” with summer moves

• Europa League results

It has gone from bad to worse for German teams in international competitions in the past couple weeks, capped of by Bayer Leverkusen managing to get eliminated from the Europa League against FK Krasnodar.

The team that has been somewhat on a tear in the Bundesliga has been eliminated in both Cup competitions (DFB Cup and Europa League) in the span of two weeks while being the favorite. A 1:1 draw at home against Krasnodar was not enough to get to the round of sixteen after a 0:0 in the first leg. Peter Bosz & Co. will now have to focus entirely on the league starting with a duel against BVB this Sunday.

The lone bright spot for the Bundesliga remains Eintracht Frankfurt and their stellar showings in the Europa League. Frankfurt comfortably won their game 4:1 at home against Shakhtar Donetsk to qualify for the next round, led by their attacking trio consisting of Jovic, Rebic and Haller. There are still some big names in the Europa League like Napoli, Arsenal, Chelsea and Sevilla but given Frankfurt’s performances so far there’s no reason to believe they couldn’t beat any of those teams.

• Raphael Guerreiro interview (Ruhr Nachrichten)

Guerreiro opened up in an interview with Ruhr Nachrichten and talked about his past injury problems, the current season and a possible contract extension. Here are a couple interesting parts of the interview:

Asked about his recurring injury problems and what he’s done to change that:

“[...]I believed in myself and worked hard on myself. For example I changed my diet and lifestyle. I now have a private physiotherapist. A lot of these small details have brought me forward”.

His current contract with Dortmund expires in 2020 and he seems willing to extend his time with the black and yellows:

“My focus this season is to be as successful as possible with BVB. There will be talks with the club officials and I would be very happy if there is an offer to extend the contract. [...]”

• Watzke hints at more moves in the summer

Last summer BVB was looking at an enormous rebuild, the club just barely qualified for the Champions League, they needed a new coach and had to change significant parts of it’s roster.

Now a few months later we can say that most of the moves of the past summer have been a success but that does not mean the rebuild is complete. As Watzke and Zorc had put it at the end of last season, they would need two summer transfer windows to make all the necessary changes. Even though Dortmund are on the right track it seems that they are already working on making significant changes once again.

On Brinkhoff’s Ballgeflüster, a football talkshow created for BVB.de Hans-Joachim Watzke announced that the club would look to improve the team in the summer:

“We see significant room for improvement, there are things we need to do to get even better, have more depth, and even better in the lead. In the summer we will need to do a few things.”

He did not go into detail what that exactly means but at this point it seems likely that the club will look to add 4-5 players for various positions. Considering the recent rumors it seems that BVB are looking to add at least one fullback, a central midfielder a winger and a striker.