Gladbach sack coach Eugen Polanski after three straight defeats: 0 points, 12 goals conceded and a verdict written in advance

Late on 12 September, in Incheon, I sat down in front of a screen at 22:30 to watch a match almost nobody in the country I live in cares about. Gladbach hosting Freiburg. By the 62nd minute it was 4-0 to the visitors. By the 78th it was 5-0.

I muted the commentary, left the pictures flickering, and listened to the ceiling fan spin in a ninth-floor flat in Songdo. The stadium was empty, but I could hear the hearts of thousands of supporters beating as one. And that rhythm, honestly, was the rhythm of resignation. Not booing. Not whistling. The silence of a stand that has grown far too used to being abandoned.

The next day, Sunday 13 September 2026, Borussia Mönchengladbach announced they had parted ways with head coach Eugen Polanski. Three matches, three defeats, zero points. A statement prepared in advance, waiting only for the excuse.

At 65 I still stay up until three in the morning to watch a match nobody cares about. But 49 years in this trade taught me one thing: the harshest verdicts in football are never handed down on the pitch. They are handed down in meeting rooms, with polite nods, before anyone has reached the lift.

To understand why a three-match sacking matters, you have to understand who Gladbach are.

This is a club that won the Bundesliga five times, in 2026, 2026, 2026, 2026 and 2026. They lifted the UEFA Cup in 2026 and 2026. In 2026 they reached the European Cup final and lost to Liverpool. The generation of Berti Vogts, Jupp Heynckes, Rainer Bonhof and Allan Simonsen turned a small textile town on the Lower Rhine into the centre of European football. The nickname Die Fohlen, the Foals, was born in that era.

Half a century later the name survives but the weight has evaporated. Gladbach are now a mid-sized club living off their academy, off player sales, and off the belief that the past will return on its own if you are sincere enough.

Eugen Polanski, born in 2026, is a club man. He came through the Gladbach youth ranks, played for the senior side for many seasons, and later returned to the club as a coach. In September 2026 he was handed the first-team job.

The opening three matches of the new season played out like a slow-motion accident. A 0-3 defeat to RB Leipzig. A 3-4 defeat to promoted Elversberg, having conceded three second-half goals. Then, on Saturday 12 September, a 0-5 home collapse against Freiburg.

Add it up: zero points, three goals scored, twelve conceded, a goal difference of -9, bottom of the table.

Sporting director Rouven Schroeder said in the club statement: "Despite a good pre-season and some encouraging signs, the team haven't been able to get the results we were looking for in the Bundesliga. Our recent performances ultimately led us to the conclusion that a change was needed, and we have therefore relieved Eugen of his duties with immediate effect."

Former Mainz 05 coach Jan-Moritz Lichte takes over on an interim basis.

Read Schroeder's statement three times and you stop at four words: a good pre-season.

That is the language of a man defending a decision he made in the summer. A good pre-season has never proven anything. I have sat through enough July evenings watching teams win 4-0 and 5-1 before collapsing in September. Pre-season football is a marketing product: it sells tickets, shirts and hope. It answers no question about defensive capacity when Freiburg arrive and play the game at full intensity.

Gladbach's problem does not sit on the manager's chair. It sits in the fact that the board appointed a former player because he was a former player, then sacked him three matches later because he had never been prepared to be anything else.

Twelve goals conceded in three matches, four per game, is not an accident. It is a system. In the Bundesliga, where pressing is the default religion, a team that loses the ball in the middle third concedes within ten seconds. Gladbach lost the ball in the middle third constantly, and the distance between their back line and their midfield was wide enough for opponents to walk into the box before needing to accelerate. What is frightening is the repetition: three matches, three different scripts, the same way of dying.

The attack saved nobody. All three Gladbach goals came in a single match. In the other two they did not score at all. A team that must score three to win is not a team. It is a gamble.

Matchday two matters more than matchday three.

Losing 0-5 at home to Freiburg is humiliation, but Freiburg are well coached and structurally clear, and on a night when everything disintegrates the scoreline can exaggerate almost anything. Losing to Elversberg is the indictment. Elversberg were promoted. Gladbach scored three and still lost. The three goals they conceded came in the second half, which means they went into the break with the game intact and came out of it with a defence that had melted.

If all three goals arrived after the interval, the problem is not fitness. It is adjustment. A coach gets fifteen minutes in the dressing room to fix a hole the entire stadium can see. Polanski could not fix it. Perhaps he lacked the tools. Perhaps he did not know where to start. Both possibilities lead to the same place.

At 65 I have watched too many clubs travel this road. They call it identity, DNA, tradition. I call it a way of postponing construction. A big club's academy is a stockpile of talent, and I will say it plainly: fewer than 10 percent of academy graduates ever get a proper path to the first team. The rest pad out a reserve squad, flatter the accounts, or get sold to a second-division club in Austria. Clubs that believe their academy is a tactical plan usually confuse a ticket in with a route out.

The Polanski appointment sits exactly inside that pattern. A club man. A man who understands the culture. A man who will not demand much. A man the stands will tolerate longer than they would tolerate an outsider. The board called it a smart bet. I call it indecision dressed as sentiment.

And here is where I have to talk about silence.

When the whole press room goes quiet, I know I have touched the sore spot. In 2026, aged 56, I sat in a room full of men after Incheon United lost 0-3 and asked the coach directly whether pairing a 35-year-old centre-back with a 20-year-old defender was suicide. The room laughed. The coach went silent for ten seconds and then admitted it. Men may look down on me, but they cannot look down on my question.

Gladbach's statement is silent in a different way. No player is named. No admission about the recruitment plan. No explanation of how a team about to concede twelve goals in three games entered the season with that defence. The polish of the wording is the tell. Someone genuinely accountable speaks clumsily.

Where could I be wrong?

I could be wrong in underestimating the squad. It may be true that Gladbach have one of the three worst squads in the league, and in that case no coach survives zero points and a -9 goal difference. Anyone in that chair would have been sacked, and all this structural talk is a roundabout way of stating something simple: the team is not good enough.

I could also be wrong about Lichte. He has coached Mainz 05, he knows the Bundesliga, and an interim at a crisis club often gets the so-called bounce. Frightened teams frequently play better once there is nobody left to blame.

And I accept one more possibility: perhaps Polanski was never wrong. Perhaps he simply took a job no sane person should have taken at that moment. If so, this verdict is not about him. It is about the people who hired him and then, three months later, wondered why they were not winning.

People hate me because I say it first, then remember me because I was right. So I will say it first again, publicly and verifiably: by the winter break Gladbach will not have reached twenty points. And their next permanent head coach will not be a former player of the club.

I will also bet that Lichte does not get a long-term deal. Not because he is poor, but because the Gladbach board still has not answered the question it must answer before signing anyone: what does this club want to be in 2030?

Sacking a coach is the easiest job in football. It needs one meeting, one press release and one signature. Building a team needs someone willing to say what nobody wants to hear, and patient enough to be misunderstood for the first eighteen months.

Polanski left after three matches. Gladbach still have the same question, with a different name sitting in front of it.

And if they sack another one this winter, you will know exactly where the problem is.