I saw them getting kicked out by Liverpool last season, does that count?
Spurs and Dortmund have comparable resources, revenue.
Your lottery thing makes no sense. If the ambition is to make money by selling top players then Dortmund are doing superb job. Spurs have excellent first team and they did excellent job of extending all their contracts.
Not sure what's the point of naming all the players you retained, of course no team will lose it's entire squad. Also Weigl, Pulisic are young players, will see where they will be playing when they are fully developed.
Also Dortmund fans said Mkhitaryan said all the season that he is extending contract and they were sure of it, only in mid March or something he decided against it, so using goal.com site or just journalists guess work isn't going to help.
Spurs comparison is not silly. They have similar structure (signing young players) and similar revenues.
Regarding retaining players, Spurs have few excellent players and they have retained them. They haven't done well in CL KOs but neither did Modric and Bale before moving to Madrid.
I'm comparing with Spurs for obvious reasons. They have similar revenues and one team isn't losing players, not because they lack excellent players but because teams don't want to deal with them as Levy will take them for ride.
My point would be that Spurs, on the whole, are not doing better than Dortmund, so why would Spurs serve to pose as some model for BVB to aspire to?
The other thing, of course, is that all the cases of top players leaving BVB in recent years, those players wanted to leave and had only one year of contract left. Players are only 'your' players as long as they are contracted, so if a player doesn't renew there's nothing the club can do.
Then the decision is merely whether to cash in on a player you're sure to lose one year later, or force the player to see out his contract. In Lewandowski's case, they chose the force option, in others, they decided to cash in. Both Hummels and Mkhi brought them pretty big fees for players with only one year left.
Another decision is how to reinvest - big fees (and wages!) for established players as replacement, or spread it out into top talents? As
@Balu pointed out above, BVB have not had the greatest experiences with the more expensive high profile replacements, let's not forget Mkhitaryan, who was the club record signing as Götze 'replacement', had only one great season out of three, with the first bbeing mediocre and the second catastrophic. Immobile, who was expensive too joining as Serie A top goalscorer, didn't work out either.
Götze and Schürrle, both big money signings, surely turned out worse than Dembele and Guerreiro.
I really don't get what glaring flaws of club management you can detect in all of that.
Again, Spurs may have a slightly different approach, more impermeable and hard-nosed towards letting players leave, but then they still don't have a better team than BVB as a result, do they? So what?
And Atletico, the other example you cited, kept selling stars constantly after successful seasons, Aguero, De Gea, Falcao, Luis, Costa, Turan. If Griezmann leaves in summer, or next summer, he will have been at Atletico for 2, or 3, seasons. Three wasted years for Atletico then? Makes no sense to argue that.
