Personal

Outside the office.

Borussia Dortmund on Saturdays, long drives on weekends, and a slow, growing list of countries on a wall map.

Football

Borussia Dortmund

Following Borussia Dortmund through the Bundesliga calendar.

I picked up Dortmund years ago and have followed them since: Westfalenstadion when the schedule and the budget align, the rest from the sofa. A steady kind of support, kept up because the team is mine and because Saturdays are better with a match on.

The Yellow Wall, the Südtribüne of Westfalenstadion in Dortmund, packed end to end. — Borussia is a working club. "Echte Liebe" is not a slogan in Dortmund, it is the contract: you show up, you put the shift in, you sing through the bad seasons. The Yellow Wall is twenty-five thousand voices stacked above the south goal, and up close it is the same crowd that clocks in on Mondays. I came to Schwarzgelb the long way round, warehouse pallets before keyboards, and the team's grammar of grind, then rise, then open your wings, has never stopped sounding right.
Jürgen Klopp set the tone I still measure managers by, gegenpressing with a system underneath it, locker-room intuition in front of it, and press-conference answers that landed somewhere between a joke and a scalpel.
Photo: editorial composite, Westfalenstadion. Reference image via AllFootball Classic, 2012–13 Champions League feature.

Bundesliga standings
Pos	Team	P	W	D	L	GD	Pts
1	BVBDortmund	7	5	2	0	+8	17
2	FCBBayern	6	4	2	0	+17	14
3	SCFFreiburg	6	4	1	1	+9	13
4	B04Leverkusen	6	4	1	1	+7	13
5	RBLLeipzig	7	4	0	3	+9	12
6	SVWBremen	7	3	3	1	+1	12
7	M05Mainz	7	3	1	3	+3	10
8	ELVElversberg	7	3	1	3	-3	10
9	FCAAugsburg	7	2	3	2	+4	9
10	HSVHSV	7	3	0	4	-10	9
11	KOEKöln	7	2	2	3	-3	8
12	PADPaderborn	7	2	2	3	-3	8
13	SGEFrankfurt	7	2	2	3	-7	8
14	TSGHoffenheim	6	2	0	4	-3	6
15	VFBStuttgart	7	2	0	5	-3	6
16	S04S04	7	1	3	3	-3	6
17	FCUUnion Berlin	7	1	3	3	-12	6
18	BMGGladbach	7	1	0	6	-11	3