Watzke's Hardest Year and the Muscle-Strength Test of a Club

With every metre, the degree of outrage gave way to the degree of responsibility.

Hans-Joachim Watzke told that story on Sky's programme 'Meine Geschichte', broadcast at 11.15pm on Friday: the short walk from backstage to the lectern at Borussia Dortmund's annual general meeting on 25 November 2026. Inside his head another voice was shouting that he should simply let everyone sort out their own mess. He said he was not raised that way. So he kept walking. With every metre, a portion of anger was traded for a portion of responsibility.

People remember a club through European nights, through 89th-minute goals, through burning banners on the south stand. I remember other things. I remember a young defender standing in front of a muscle-strength testing device on a Tuesday morning, eyes on the floor, while a physiotherapist weighed whether to say something nobody wanted to hear. After eighteen years at the edge of the pitch, I have learned that the collapse of a body and the collapse of an institution follow the same road: for a long time nobody sees anything, and then suddenly everybody does.

The result in Dortmund: 59 per cent.

Watzke was elected president, but the margin disappointed him, as he later admitted. A man who had just spent twenty years at a club, elected with fewer than six votes in ten, calling 2026 the hardest year of his two decades there. He said it plainly: "The way it then unfolded, with one intrigue or another also directed against me, it was a difficult year for me, the most difficult of the 20 years." Asked why, he did not hedge: "Because certain people simply wanted to prevent me from becoming president. And the fact that that happens at BVB, after 20 years, really affected me."

That is data. I believe in data, but data also lies when you do not ask it the right question.

Context: twenty years built by hand, not by money

Watzke served as managing director of Dortmund from 2026 to 2026. He took over a club close to financial ruin and had to restructure it to survive. He guided it through that period and then helped shape one of the most successful cycles in the history of the Ruhr club: two Bundesliga titles, a Champions League final, consecutive European campaigns and a playing identity the rest of the continent studied.

By 2026 Watzke was no longer merely a club executive. He was league president of the DFB and first vice-president of the DFB. A man sitting at the intersection of a listed club, a national league and a federation. Every decision he made carried weight far beyond the city limits of Dortmund.

In the late summer of last year he planned to step down as managing director in October 2026, after twenty years. He was seen as the designated president for the election four weeks later. It looked like an orderly handover, the kind big clubs stage so that supporters can sleep well.

Then interim president Reinhold Lunow, 73, announced in a surprise move, against previous agreements, that he would also run. A short but fairly fierce mud-slinging campaign followed. Lunow ultimately withdrew. Watzke, who says of himself that he "was never a dictator", nearly walked away from all of it.

On paper this is boardroom business. To me, it is an injury case.

The crack is not on the X-ray

In 2026, when I was twenty-five and had just started as a sports-medicine editor at a media platform in Guangzhou, I was allowed into a major club's medical room to film. A young defender was rehabilitating an anterior cruciate ligament rupture. On paper everything looked fine. But the timeline had been pushed forward abnormally. I quietly noted it: the player had reached only 78 per cent quadriceps strength while the coaching staff still put him on the matchday list for round 25.

He played twelve minutes, re-injured, and missed four more months.

I did not write a critical piece. I wrote a three-page internal report proposing a mandatory muscle-strength test before any player returned. Two decades on, I keep one rule: verify at least three data sources before writing about any injury, and never conclude by judging people.

The crack is not on the X-ray, it is in the way we listen to the body.

The same holds for an institution. No X-ray shows a fractured board. No MRI detects that a man who gave twenty years to a club has begun asking himself whether he should walk up to the lectern at all. But the signs are always there, scattered and small as microscopic tears in a tendon: a postponed meeting, a statement left unsigned, an interview shorter than usual, a man silent in the second row.

The 59 per cent Watzke received on 25 November 2026 is Dortmund's muscle-strength test. It is not a defeat. It is a below-threshold signal.

A five-indicator model, applied to a board

In 2026, running injury analysis for the World Cup in Russia, I built a model called the recurrence risk score with five indicators: muscle endurance, pain level, minutes played, training load and psychological state. I followed the fifth-metatarsal injury Neymar had suffered at his club, saw that the medical staff were repeating the exact script of a year earlier, and projected a 72 per cent recurrence risk when he returned to the national team. One of the national team's physiotherapists shared the piece. It reached around fifty thousand reads and brought me a long-term collaboration with a data analysis outlet.

The biggest lesson was not the 72 per cent. It was learning to present risk as a scale rather than a certainty, to keep the tone neutral, and to explain complex indicators in language an ordinary fan can follow.

Today I apply the same model to a club.

Muscle endurance becomes operational capacity: does the organisation still have enough people who understand the work, or only one. Pain level becomes accumulated internal resentment, the thing Watzke described as "intrigue directed against me". Minutes played becomes the uninterrupted years of key personnel with no rotation mechanism. Training load becomes the volume of decisions piled on one chair: transfers, budget, communications, federation relations. And psychological state becomes member trust in the leadership, measured by the ballot itself.

All five indicators are red. This time I do not need a physiotherapist to confirm it.

The medical room inside the storm

This is the least discussed part, and the one I care about most.

When a club's leadership is busy fighting itself, attention drops to the lower floors. Down there sit people who make decisions nobody names in a board meeting: the club doctor, the physiotherapists, the fitness coach, the nutritionist. Their decisions never appear in a financial report. A player back two weeks early, a player stretched beyond his limit, a training block cut because of fixture congestion, a recurrence in the eightieth minute.

Viewers see the goal. I see that knee three months later.

In a year when a board's energy is fragmented, marginal decisions in the medical room tend to slide towards those with the least power. They are the ones who have to say no inside an organisation that needs a yes to reassure its own structure. Over my career I have seen too many of these cases to keep believing in coincidence.

There are mistakes that only surface after the season ends, when the lights have gone out.

The bench hurts nobody. What hurts is that nobody explains why.

An empty season, and what silence taught me

In 2026, when the pandemic emptied stadiums and leagues had to restructure their calendars, I was twenty-eight and a mid-level editor in charge of data. When the competition restarted in July, I used my risk model to forecast that muscle injuries would rise by roughly 40 per cent because of congested fixtures.

I recommended that the number 9 striker of the club I was tracking start on the bench in the derby. Supporters pushed back hard, calling me an excessive pessimist. In that very match two other players suffered muscle injuries. The striker, rested, then scored four goals in five games.

I took responsibility for worrying the fans. Privately I knew the club had avoided a major loss. The 2026 season taught me this: silence is also a shift on duty.

In Dortmund, during the autumn 2026 power struggle, there was a silence of the same kind. It was not among those who spoke. It was among those who were not allowed to.

Staying is not automatically a victory

The popular version of this story is tidy: Watzke was opposed, Watzke considered leaving, Watzke decided to stay, Watzke was elected. The end. A complete ending for a loyal man.

I look at the same data and see something else.

A club that lets one man stand at the centre for twenty years has built an architecture with a single load-bearing column. When that column shifts, the whole roof shakes. The surprise candidacy of a 73-year-old interim president is not a historical accident. It is an indicator of dependency. In an organisation with healthy succession, one person changing chairs is a line in the minutes.

What struck me was not the 59 per cent but the fact that Watzke felt the need to say he was never a dictator. Nobody says that unless somebody believes the opposite.

The other forty-one per cent

When a player reaches 78 per cent quadriceps strength, the right question is not why he has not reached 100. The right question is where the missing 22 per cent sits, in which muscle group, and who is responsible for closing the gap.

When Watzke receives 59 per cent of the vote, the right question is not why he did not reach 90. The right question is who makes up the other 41 per cent, which memories, which decisions from the past twenty years. Some are unhappy about a transfer. Some are unhappy about ticket prices. Some feel the club has drifted away from its local community while global sponsors care only about brand exposure. Some are simply unhappy about modern football.

But part of that 41 per cent is a technical signal, and technical signals are handled with protocols, not with speeches.

The biggest blind spot nobody asks about

Throughout this story, one group is almost absent from every conversation: the players and the people who maintain their bodies.

A power struggle lasting months at the highest level affects the transfer market, the budget, pre-season planning. It also affects things that never make the news: the stability of the medical department, the continuity of the fitness programme, the right of a physiotherapist to speak up when he believes a player needs ten more days off.

Responsibility does not need a grandstand; it needs one person keeping discipline every morning.

A player with no broken leg can still be breaking from the inside.

After twenty years, Watzke deserved an annual general meeting that thanked him. What he got was a mud-slinging campaign, an underwhelming vote and an unanswered question about whether those two decades left behind a machine, or just a man.

A rehabilitation protocol for an institution

I do not know where Dortmund go next season. I know exactly what protocol a case like this requires.

First, load must be increased in steps, not on impulse. For a body, that means raising training volume each week within tolerance. For a board, it means handing specific powers to specific people, with terms and with oversight.

Second, there must be a strength test before returning to competition. For an institution, that means a transparent assessment of succession capacity in every key position, not a press conference.

Third, it must be accepted that part of recovery has no applause. No grandstand watches the 6am session in the gym. No bulletin reports the physiotherapist who insists on saying no to a bad decision. But those mornings decide a season, and sometimes a decade.

At thirty-four, after eighteen years watching this industry from the edge of the pitch, from medical-room corridors, from behind the technical bench, I have stopped believing in miraculous comebacks. I only believe in planned ones.

If a player needs four months to return after a recurrence, how long does a club need to return after a year of internal meltdown? And who sits down the next morning, when there is no grandstand and no camera, only a plan and a body that has to be rebuilt properly?

Watzke answered that question by walking up to the lectern. The rest of the protocol remains open.