Gittens vs Kane: Which Englishman will win the first “Der Klassiker” of the season for their club?

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Dortmund vs Bayern 

©TM/IMAGO

On Saturday evening the biggest game in the German football calendar returns, as Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich lock horns in the first “Der Klassiker” of the Bundesliga season. New Bayern head coach Vincent Kompany has done well to quickly step into the role left behind by Thomas Tuchel at the Bavarian club and has seen his team race to the top of the Bundesliga table with nine wins and two draws from their first 11 games. As such, Bayern sit six points above the rest of the chasing pack, but new Dortmund head coach Nuri Sahin will be determined to continue their own impressive home form of six wins from six in the German top-flight and in the process put a serious dent in Bayern’s title hopes. 

Intriguingly, despite this clash being a staple of the German football calendar, this particular fixture may in fact be decided by two Englishmen plying their trade in the Bundesliga to remarkable success. On the one side we have exciting, young winger Jamie Gittens, who has burst onto the scene at Dortmund and has quickly established himself as one of Sahin’s most potent attacking threats this season. And, on the other, we have the calm and collected goalscoring of Bayern striker Harry Kane, who continues to break records in the Bundesliga with his astonishing eye for goal. But which of these English stars will turn Saturday’s tie in their team’s favour? 

Gittens goes from strength to strength at BVB

Having made the move to Dortmund from Manchester City’s youth academy, the comparisons between the young attacker and former Dortmund star Jadon Sancho are all too inevitable. However, while Gittens may share a number of similarities with the Chelsea forward, he’s very much his own player with a distinct style of football. While Sancho relied on close control in tight spaces and playing one-twos with team mates in the opposing box, Gittens is far more direct in his route to goal, often favouring to dribble by defenders and isn’t afraid of hitting shots in even the most acute angles. And as a result, the young player has quickly seen his goal contributions for the Bundesliga side rise significantly over the course of the last two or three years. 

As we can see in the table above, Gittens broke into Dortmund’s first team in the 2022/23 season, bagging three goals and one assists in 20 appearances (667 minutes) as an impact substitute. Last season, the left winger saw his game time at the club more than double to 1,396 minutes in 34 appearances across all competitions and in return he bagged a total of 10 goal contributions (two goals and eight assists). But this season has seen the young player step up to a higher level and he has now established himself as a bona fide starter in Sahin’s team. As a result, he’s already picked up 1,102 minutes of football despite it still being relatively early in the season and to the delight of Dortmund fans the young player has already bagged seven goals and four assists. 

Not only is Gittens scoring more goals and assists, but he’s also doing so at a faster pace. This season’s average in all competitions currently stands at 0.9 goals and assists per 90 minutes, which is a huge improvement on last season’s average of 0.64 goals and assists per 90. Which, itself, was an improvement on his breakthrough season’s average of 0.54 goals and assists per 90. And when we consider that the goals and assists he’s picking up this season have come against the likes of Eintracht Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Celtic and Real Madrid, it certainly points to a player that is not only growing into a senior role at Dortmund but also one that doesn’t shy away from performing in the big games. And they don’t come much bigger than Saturday’s clash with Bayern. 

Can Kane down Dortmund?

It would be hard to fault Kane for putting a foot wrong since he touched down in Munich, with the England international amassing a goalscoring record that few in the history of German football could come close to rivalling. In the previous matchday, the Bayern striker broke the record for quickest player to reach 50 league goals in the Bundesliga. The previous record had been held by Erling Haaland, when he bagged 50 goals in 50 games for Dortmund, but with a hat-trick against Augsburg, Kane reached the remarkable achievement with seven games to spare. And a closer comparison between the two strikers really shows how well Kane has done since making the move to Bayern. 

As we can see in the graphic above, Kane is gaining quickly on Haaland’s 62 goals in 67 games during his time in the Bundesliga with Dortmund. Remarkably, despite Haaland’s goalscoring record demanding the attention and serious interest of every major club in the world in 2022, Kane is actually scoring goals at a higher rate than his Norwegian counterpart. As we can see, Haaland departed the Bundesliga with an impressive record of 1.04 league goals per 90 minutes. But Kane continues to perform at an even higher level, with 1.19 goals per 90 minutes of league football for Bayern. 

However, that’s not to say that a hat-trick against Dortmund on Saturday is a foregone conclusion. While Kane has already scored 14 goals in 11 league games, that haul of goals have come in just seven matches. Interestingly enough, the England striker has already bagged hat-tricks against smaller clubs like Holstein Kiel, Stuttgart and Augsburg, but failed to score a single goal against top-four opponents like Leverkusen or Eintracht Frankfurt. The same could be said of his form in the Champions League, where Kane scored four goals against Dinamo Zagreb, but was notably quiet against Aston Villa and Paris Saint-Germain. Kane can score goals for fun when Bayern dominate matches, but he can often struggle when opposing teams put more pressure on him. Whether he can stick the ball in the back of the net on Saturday will likely come down to how well Dortmund defend against him.