Former Arsenal chief scout Sven Mislintat has been sacked for the second time in less than 18 months.
Borussia Dortmund confirmed the news in a club statement, with Mislintat leaving his role as technical director.
Prior to his stint back at BVB, the German held the post of sporting director at Dutch giants Ajax but similarly lasted a short time, just four months.
Just minutes after Niko Kovac’s press conference ahead of the weekend’s match against Stuttgart, Dortmund wrote online: “Bundesliga football club Borussia Dortmund has released its technical director Sven Mislintat with immediate effect.
“Lars Ricken, BVB’s sports director, personally informed Mislintat of this decision on Thursday.”
Mislintat previously worked at Dortmund from 2006 to 2017, rising up the ranks to chief scout and head of football.
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The now 52-year-old was credited with playing a huge part in Jurgen Klopp’s two Bundesliga titles at the Westfalenstadion, and was given the nickname ‘diamond eye’ for spotting players like Shinji Kagawa, Ousmane Dembele and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.
Yet this time around things went far less swimmingly, with a power struggle at board level dominating the headlines around Dortmund in recent weeks.
At executive level BVB have departing CEO Hans Joachim Watzke, sports director Lars Ricken, sporting director Sebastian Kehl and advisor Matthias Sammer.
In Dortmund’s last match against Werder Bremen, fans made their feelings clear with a banner that read: “Address the elephant in the room – the problems are not on the sidelines.”
Watzke then took the subject public, saying at a conference: “It’s all about the question: ‘Do the three of them (Ricken, Kehl and Sammer) harmonise with each other?’ That still needs to be optimised.
“They’ve only been together for half a year, but in football there are of course always strong egos. Everyone tries to test their limits.
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“Ricken’s job now is to ensure that everyone is marching in the same direction and if you get the feeling in the medium term that they’re not, you have to change something in the concept. But that’s not my issue anymore.”
By putting his name on Mislintat’s dismissal, Ricken has seemingly done exactly that, and he’s not the first one to struggle with the former scout.
After leaving Arsenal in 2019 he spent three years as sporting director at Stuttgart, later swapping to the same role with Ajax in May 2023, but was sacked four months later in September.
Soon after he was the subject of a conflict of interest investigation by the KPMG (Dutch financial auditors) over a deal for Borna Sosa from Stuttgart as he and the player’s agency, AKA Global, were shareholders of the company Matchmetrics GmbH.
The KMPG cleared Mislintat of any wrongdoing, but his reputation then took another hit when his replacement at Ajax, Alex Kroes, laid into him in the media.
With Mislintat leaving Ajax with the club 14th in the Eredivisie, a book called ‘Ajax in Crisis’ was released by journalist Menno de Galan who interviewed Kroes and quoted him as saying his predecessor was a “masterful fraudster and charming con artist.”
He would add that Mislintat’s summer transfer window which saw 12 signings was ‘the worst in club history’ and finish: “Four left-backs? I would have slapped people in the face if I had known that as a manager. Four left-backs and no right-back? That’s really terrible.”