Borussia Monchengladbach have been through something of a transition season after reaching the heights of fourth in last season’s campaign. After arguably their best three players were sold to the teams that finished above them with Marco Reus heading to Dortmund, Dante to Bayern and Roman Neustadter to Schalke, Lucien Favre had to bring in a few new faces to the team and some of the existing team had to step up in place of the departing players, Patrick Herrmann in particular did so with a number of very good performances. They started the season well and usually challenged the bigger teams but often beating the smaller teams was an issue as they dropped points to Dusseldorf, Bremen and Augsburg in the first part of the season. Nevertheless at the turn of the year they were still in contention for honours both domestically and in Europe where they had negotiated a difficult group dumping Marseille out of the Europa League. But they failed to accelerate and had a poor January and February, winning just one game which left them out of Europe and behind in the race for the top six at home. Though they did manage to pick up near the end of the season they finished just outside the European places with a last day push thwarted by an incredible Bayern Munchen comeback. They have a squad capable of doing much better than they showed this year and will reinforce during the summer meaning they will come back much stronger next year.
