Borussia Mönchengladbach Appoint Alexander Blessin Until 2028

Borussia Mönchengladbach have appointed Alexander Blessin as head coach until June 2028 after four straight defeats left them bottom of the Bundesliga with 16 goals already conceded.

It is the worst start to a Bundesliga season in the club’s history and, judging by the scorelines, it hasn’t exactly been a quiet one. Gladbach have lost 3-0, 4-3, 5-0 and 4-3 in their opening four matches, with Saturday’s home defeat to Mainz coming under interim coach Jan-Moritz Lichte after Eugen Polanski was dismissed earlier this month.

Polanski’s exit came only a few months after Gladbach had backed him to continue following last season’s 12th-place finish. He had originally stepped up from the reserve side when Gerardo Seoane left in September 2025, earned the job permanently two months later and did enough to keep Borussia comfortably in the division.

By May, sporting chief Rouven Schröder had decided to stick with him while making changes around the squad and coaching staff. Four league games into the new season, that plan was gone.

It says plenty about where Gladbach are at the moment.

This is still one of German football’s great names. Borussia won five Bundesliga titles during the 1970s, lifted the UEFA Cup twice and reached the European Cup final in 1977. They were playing Champions League knockout football as recently as 2021 after coming through a group containing Real Madrid and Inter Milan.

The years since have been far less glamorous. Gladbach have finished 14th, 10th and 12th across their last three completed Bundesliga seasons and haven’t returned to Europe since that Champions League run. The club still pulls more than 50,000 supporters into Borussia-Park and carries the expectations that come with its history, but the football has gradually moved further away from both.

That is the club Blessin is walking into.

His career has taken a less conventional route than most Bundesliga appointments. Blessin spent eight years working in RB Leipzig’s youth system before leaving Germany for Oostende, followed by Genoa and Union Saint-Gilloise.

Union was where his reputation really grew. Blessin won the Belgian Cup in 2024, took the title race to the final day and oversaw a European campaign that included a win over Liverpool and victory over Eintracht Frankfurt in the Conference League.

St Pauli brought him back to Germany later that summer, and his first season there offers a fairly good clue as to why Gladbach have turned to him now. Newly promoted, St Pauli stayed up after conceding only 41 Bundesliga goals, fewer than every side apart from Bayern Munich.

They only scored 28 themselves, so nobody was mistaking them for one of the great attacking sides of the age, but they were difficult to play through and rarely gave opponents much for free.

The following season went the other way. St Pauli finished bottom and Blessin left after relegation in June, so Gladbach aren’t hiring somebody on the back of an uninterrupted rise. What they are getting is a coach whose best teams have been organised, aggressive without the ball and comfortable competing without the biggest budget around.

That probably explains more about the appointment than the name itself.

Gladbach reported revenue of €189.3 million for 2025 but still recorded a loss of almost €4 million, while personnel costs fell from €98.5 million to €94.6 million. They remain a sizeable Bundesliga club, but the recent model has depended much more on recruitment, development and getting coaching decisions right than simply spending their way back towards Europe.

Blessin’s background fits that reality. He spent years developing young players at Leipzig, worked at clubs where coaching had to close financial gaps and has already shown he can build a Bundesliga side that is difficult to score against.

After conceding 16 times in four matches, Gladbach could probably live with being slightly less entertaining for a while.

Blessin will be formally presented alongside Schröder at Borussia-Park at 13:30 CEST on Wednesday before beginning work with the squad during the international break.

His first Bundesliga match comes away to Köln on 11 October.

Four defeats, 16 goals conceded and then a Rhine derby for your first game.

Welcome back to the Bundesliga.