A Year at Fear the Wall

Good morning everyone!

For those of our readers who celebrate Christmas, I hope that by now you have jingled bells, roasted chestnuts, and safely enjoyed the company of loved ones as much as we can right now. To all our readers, I hope you are resting, relaxing, and getting excited for the coming New Year.

I was sorting through some emails earlier this week and realized that one year ago today, 12/26, I was welcomed to Fear the Wall as a writer. I would like to take a quick second of your time to thank you all for creating such a fun and energetic community of Borussia Dortmund fans to write for and interact with as someone who is passionate about football and a certain German team. I read Fear the Wall articles for years before becoming a writer, and I can clearly remember my anxious excitement applying to join the team when Sean sent the open application around. Since then, I have come to greatly enjoy engaging in the analytics of German and European football and seeing what you, our readers, will have to say about our assertions and observations. After publishing an article, I eagerly await your comments, discussions, and arguments.

The Fear the Wall community is an excellent example of the ethos of the club we all follow. Each of our readers and writers wears the joy and pain of fandom on their sleeve; demanding change when the team falters and firing off GIFs in the match thread when the team succeeds. Through cup clashes, COVID cases, job interviews, and life changes, the FTW team of writers and editors always ensures that we get our content out there for you to read, and support one another when we need help to do so.

I speak for our whole team when I say how grateful we are for your membership in this community, and I personally thank you for a great first year as a writer for this site. I look forward to the highs and the lows this season’s Rückrunde will provide for us and am eager to share those moments with everyone in the Fear the Wall community.

Below are some of my favorite pieces I have written for FTW so far if you would like to revisit them. Please feel free to use the comments space on this article to suggest things you would like to see from Fear the Wall articles in the new year, and what you like and do not like about what we write now. I’ll be reading!

Echte Liebe!

The Mystery of Mahmoud Dahoud

A Love Letter to Jadon Sancho

Dortmund Need to Sign a New Center Back because of Thorgan Hazard