Borussia Dortmund Could Be in for Slow Start to 2016/17 Season

Pre-season is finally coming to a close for Borussia Dortmund, with the DFL-Supercup against Bundesliga champions Bayern Munich on Sunday in Signal Iduna Park marking the starting point for the coming season.

The Black and Yellows will play two more friendly matches against 2. and 3. Bundesliga sides SV Sandhausen and Hallescher FC, as well as the first round of the DFB-Pokal against Eintracht Trier, a fourth-division club, before the start of the Bundesliga campaign.

However, even though the Supercup doesn't have great importance in Germany, it can be considered the curtain raiser of the season. For the Black and Yellows, it also signifies the end of a difficult summer that could well lead into a slow start to the season.

Much has been made of their busy transfer window, in which they've so far made 12 first-team transfers alone.

The big challenge is now to integrate eight new players into a team that saw its hierarchy shaken up with the sales of team captain Mats Hummels, midfield mastermind Ilkay Gundogan and Henrikh Mkhitaryan, who arguably was the club's best player last season.

The meeting with nemesis Bayern will not be much of a measuring stick in that regard, seeing as head coach Thomas Tuchel already more or less ruled out selecting players who only joined up with the team for the training camp in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland, at the start of August, per Spox.com's Jochen Tittmar (link in German).

That would mean the Ruhr side will be without Lukasz Piszczek, Raphael Guerreiro, Julian Weigl, Mario Gotze and Andre Schurrle, all possible or even presumptive starters in the coming months. 

PATRIK STOLLARZ/Getty Images

Even with first-choice XIs, the Supercup has rarely been indicative of the season it preceded. The Bavarians, for example, lost all three attempts to win the trophy under Pep Guardiola before running away with the Bundesliga title with 19 and (twice) 10 points advantage over the second-placed teams.

Of course, that mostly has to do with the scheduling two weeks ahead of the start of the domestic campaign and the minor status of the competition. Fans of the losing side on Sunday won't be too down.

However, a defeat for Dortmund would fit the mould of this pre-season. In short, it feels as if there was a spanner in the Black and Yellows' works.

Their performances in friendly matches have alternated between impressive (in a 4-1 win over Manchester United) and disappointing, with defeats against Athletic Bilbao and 1860 Munich leaving much to be desired.

There were quite a few mitigating circumstances to consider in the evaluation of their games and, generally speaking, not too much stock ought to be put into test matches anyway, but the fact remains that Dortmund look like a work in progress, much more so than last season.

It's only natural that they lack cohesion at this stage, due to the large number of new faces in the squad and the team coming together relatively late following Euro 2016. Still, though, expectations should be lowered considerably after the summer Dortmund have had.

"

Tuchel: After today's impressions I could do without the Super Cup. We mustn't have too high expectations. #bvb https://t.co/m5C9v68lBq

— Stefan Buczko (@bvbawesome) August 9, 2016"

It stands to reason that the Black and Yellows could've become even bigger challengers for Bayern's throne this season had the team stayed together, seeing as the Bavarians are undergoing a big change themselves with Carlo Ancelotti replacing Guardiola.

Dortmund were closer last season than the final table indicated—they lost five of their 10-point gap to Bayern during the final two matchdays—with Bayern attacker Thomas Muller calling them "very annoying" in an interview with sport magazine Kicker (link in German, h/t Steffen Peters of Bayern Central): "They did not even know or think themselves that they were annoying for us. We can be proud. In this year, we really had to invest a lot."

However, after a summer of upheaval, any thoughts of contesting for the Bundesliga title are out of the question for the Black and Yellows.

Oliver Kremer at Pixolli Studios/Getty Images

The few dreamers left in their fanbase could be in for a rude awakening early in the campaign.

Dortmund open at home against Mainz 05, who are always awkward to play against.

Then follows a trip to RB Leipzig, newcomers to the Bundesliga but not normal ones, seeing as the Red Bull-funded club invested close to €77 million in transfers over the last three summers, per Transfermarkt (link in German).

The Saxons also signed Ralph Hasenhuttl as their new head coach after the Austrian impressed at FC Ingolstadt last season. As Dustin Ward noted for StatsBomb.com, "no team allowed a lower opposition [pass] completion percentage in their own half, and only [Bayer] Leverkusen and Bayern were harder to pass against across the whole field" than Ingolstadt.

This writer highlighted the Black and Yellows' struggles against high-intensity pressure in an earlier piece, and Leipzig, with the euphoria of their first home game in the top flight a clear bonus, look like a tough place to visit early in the campaign.

Then Dortmund celebrate their return to the UEFA Champions League, which means they'll play two weeks with midweek fixtures in a row, including a game at VfL Wolfsburg, who are unlikely to disappoint for the second straight year.

The Black and Yellows start October with an away game at Leverkusen, who look stronger than last year after not losing any key players for the first time in what feels like ages and adding Kevin Volland and Julian Baumgartlinger. The meeting on Matchday 6 could go a long way to defining Dortmund's first half of the season.

Now, that's all not to say the Ruhr side will definitely stumble out of the blocks, just that it's a fairly challenging start to the campaign.

Fans can have every confidence in Tuchel's work after he turned in an impressive first season in charge at the Westfalenstadion, in which, incidentally, they won their first 11 matches across competitions.

Deniz Calagan/Getty Images

Sporting director Michael Zorc, meanwhile, told local paper Ruhr Nachrichten (link in German) that the squad left a good impression in training and simply failed to convert that to the last friendly matches. The 53-year-old club legend is convinced Dortmund will work out the adaptation process the summer has brought with it.

The question may just be how long that process will take and how much ground it will leave for Dortmund to make up on their competition. The team has too much quality not to turn in a strong season on the whole, but don't be surprised if they'll have to overcome a bumpy start.

Lars Pollmann also writes for YellowWallPod.com. You can follow him on Twitter.