Uli Hoeness praises Borussia Dortmund’s transfer policy

In a recent interview with SportBild, Bayern Munich President Uli Hoeness revealed that he’s a fan of Borussia Dortmund’s transfer policy. In the interview, Hoeness praised how Dortmund has closed the gap between themselves and Bayern with shrewd player sales, adding that they’ve been wise with their transfer business in recent windows:

Their money for investment isn’t dependent on turnover but from the profit situation. I don’t know what it is exactly at Dortmund. But Dortmund has made good transfers in the past few years.

Per Transfermarkt, in player sales and purchases alone, Dortmund flipped a profit of €23.40m (= $26.68m). The most lucrative sales were Christian Pulisic to Chelsea (€64m) and Andrii Yarmelenko to West Ham United (€20m), while the most expensive summer arrival was Abdou Diallo from Mainz (€28m).

In the summer of 2017, Dortmund’s profits were boosoted by the blockbuster sale of Ousmane Dembele to Barcelona, which cost the Catalans a whopping €120m, helping the club turn in a player sales/purchases profit of +€146.12m. While the profits look good on paper for the finacial future of the club, Dortmund CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke said that he’d prefer not to have difficulty keeping hold of their top talents:

Of course we profit from our transfer income. But I’m not proud of it, because at the same time it comes with a loss of quality. Ideally, I don’t want to make any more sales. Because that would mean that we can keep our best players.

With Dortmund’s tight title race with Bayern this season, their fortunes could improve as far as keeping hold of their best players, but with a big transfer window upcoming for Bayern, the Black and Yellow will find it difficult to match their rival’s reinforcement efforts.