When Borussia Dortmund snapped up both Niklas Sule and Nico Schlotterbeck last summer, the narrative was that perennial underachievers of German football had finally found a centre-half partnership capable of taking Die Schwarzgelben to the next level.
Dortmund paid £21 million to pinch Schlotterbeck, one of Europe’s most exciting young defenders, from under the noses of Newcastle United.
Sule, another with admirers on Tyneside, would join him at Signal Iduna Park; Dortmund getting one over on their old adversaries Bayern Munich at last, snatching the 2020 treble-winner from the clutches of their bitter Bundesliga rivals on a free transfer.
The performances of both Sule and Schlotterbeck during Germany’s catastrophic 2-1 defeat to Japan in Wednesday’s World Cup opener, however, will have felt disturbingly familiar to Dortmund supporters who, understandably, expected much better.
Schlotterbeck, under BVB coach Edin Terzic, has looked a shadow of the player who stood strong and tall at Freiburg. You can say the same of Sule; a man who lifted no fewer than 14 trophies at Bayern Munich singled out for all the wrong reasons by Germany boss Hansi Flick after switching off in the build up to Japan’s 82nd minute winner at the Khalifa International Stadium.
Niklas Sule and Nico Schlotterbeck flop as Germany lose to Japan at Qatar World Cup
“Niklas really has to pay much more attention,” grumbled Flick. “He didn’t execute the offside trap well. He was always late and was also way too deep. We were punished for these individual mistakes.”
German website Football News, meanwhile, pulled no punches in their assessment of Schlotterbeck’s jittery, error-ridden display. While Sule bore the brunt of Flick’s ire, it was his 22-year-old partner choking on Takuma Asano’s dust before the one-time Arsenal youngster fired a vicious winner past Manuel Neuer at the near post.
“In this form, (he is) simply not a candidate for an ambitious national team,” they write, not without justification.
If things had worked out differently, Sule and Schlotterbeck could have been lining up together at the heart of Eddie Howe’s Newcastle United backline. A backline which currently ranks as the joint-best in the whole of the Premier League.
But on Wednesday’s evidence, as Japan emulated their Far Eastern neighbours South Korea in 2018, the Sule-Schlotterbeck is neither the answer for Dortmund or for Germany.
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