The 45th calendar week of 2022 will not be remembered well by footballer Mats Hummels. It might even burn itself deep into his memory. However, this is only partly due to two defeats within four days, more to a phone call in between. On Tuesday Hummels lost 2-0 with Borussia Dortmund in Wolfsburg, on Wednesday the national coach Hansi Flick informed the 33-year-old that he would not take him to the World Cup in Qatar – and on Friday Hummels and his BVB suffered a 2-4 draw -Loss at Borussia Mönchengladbach a football collapse.
Borussia Dortmund hibernates in a disappointing sixth place after losing their final two competitive games of the year, but worse still for Hummels is not even being able to spend the first half of that two-and-a-half-month hibernation at the World Cup. Instead of playing with the German national team against Japan, Spain and Costa Rica in front of an audience of millions, Hummels plays with BVB on a trip to Asia: in Singapore against the Lion City Sailors, in Malaysia against the Johor Southern Tigers and in Hanoi against the Vietnam national team.
Not being allowed to go to the World Cup Hummels on Instagram referred to as “one of the bigger disappointments of my career”. How bad it is for him can be seen from the words of BVB sports director Sebastian Kehl, who put it this way: “Mats took the decision very, very difficult.”
From a sporting point of view, the elimination of the Dortmund central defender is incomprehensible. According to the ratings of the experts from table football, then Hummels is the best German defender in the Bundesliga so far this season. Even if you take a closer look at the goals conceded by BVB, Hummels stands out.
With him on the field, Dortmund had only conceded seven goals in the Bundesliga before the Gladbach game on Friday evening. When three goals were conceded in each of three games, against Bremen (2:3), in Leipzig (0:3) and in Cologne (2:3), Hummels was not on the pitch, but had already been substituted in the first case second substitute and in the third caught a cold. Hummels was one of the most constant players this season at the faltering BVB, but 48 hours after the shock call from the national coach, he also suffered a breakdown in Gladbach’s Borussia Park – purely from a football point of view.
Hummels has played six tournaments for Germany – all as regular players
After four minutes, Jonas Hofmann from Gladbach, who was nominated for the World Cup, made it 1-0 when he shot the ball between the two BVB defenders Niklas Süle and Nico Schlotterbeck who were nominated for the World Cup. After Julian Brandt equalized 1-1 (19′), a free kick caused by Hummels led to a 2-1 header by Gladbach’s Ramy Bensebaini (26′). And when just four minutes later Gladbach’s Marcus Thuram sprinted past Schlotterbeck to make it 3-1 after Dortmund lost the ball in midfield, Hummels couldn’t keep up either because he had been very far up the field in midfield.
In the 40th minute, Schlotterbeck reduced the lead to 2:3, but 40 seconds after the break, Gladbach’s Kouadio Koné made it 4:2. He took off from 18 meters and tunneled Hummels. The Dortmunder was spared nothing in his 400th Bundesliga game. This 45th week of the year, he would rip it out of his desk calendar if he only had one.
There are people in the industry who believe that Flick did not nominate Hummels mainly because Hummels is not a very easy guy and because he has been very critical of his own team in the past few weeks in Dortmund. They couldn’t use something like that in Qatar during the World Cup.
Hummels has been a very important player for the German Football Association in six tournaments over the past 13 years: in 2009 he became European champion with the U21s, in 2012 he played all five full-length games at the European Championship, including the lost semifinals. In 2014, when he triumphed at the World Cup in Brazil, he only missed the round of 16 because of an infection. In 2016 he played four times from the second game plus overtime in the quarterfinals and missed the lost semifinals due to a yellow card suspension. In 2018 he was also unable to prevent the embarrassing loss of the preliminary round of the World Cup, and at the 2021 European Championship, including the lost round of 16, he was again a regular regular.
Hummels would have liked to play his seventh major tournament in the German national jersey in Qatar. But, dammit, he won’t be able to play his seventh tournament anymore. Speculations are already germinating that he is so disappointed that he is considering retiring from the national team. But it’s not that far yet. And who knows, if one of the nine defenders nominated by Flick gets injured, Hummels might be able to move up.