Nico Schlotterbeck

The 24-year-old defender has been a Borussia Dortmund player since July 2022 and has made 87 appearances (six goals and ten assists) for BVB across all competitions as of July 2024 (cut-off date for all statistics).

In the 2023-24 season, Nico Schlotterbeck was a fixture at the heart of the Black & Yellows' defence, notching up the most Bundesliga appearances (33) and the most minutes played of any Dortmund player (2,861 minutes). He won 66% of his tackles (second in the league behind Köln's Jeff Chabot); a year earlier, he was even the Bundesliga's player with the highest tackle success rate, one percentage point better. The left-footer is equally capable of asserting himself both in the air and on the ground and keeps the majority of his tackles clean: Schlotterbeck only committed 16 fouls in 2023/24, but was fouled 32 times himself. He had the second-most phases of possession in the league after Leverkusen's Granit Xhaka, plays effective vertical and diagonal passes and likes to get involved in attacking play. In the Bundesliga, the blond-haired player scores on average once in every eleven games.

The Waiblingen native comes from a family of footballers. “I used to play tennis too - and I was actually pretty talented,” he said to members' magazine Borussia, “but at some point I had to choose between football and tennis. It was a very easy decision for me.” His uncle Niels played for several clubs in the Bundesliga in the 1980s and 1990s (Stuttgarter Kickers, MSV Duisburg, Hansa Rostock), and he and his older brother Keven, 26, played together in the Bundesliga in Freiburg. “My parents try to keep us grounded. And they emphasise that we're not better people just because we're in the public eye,” he says.

From the age of eight to 15, Nico played football for Stuttgarter Kickers, but was not selected for the U16s. Instead, he took a step back, playing for VfR Aalen for a year and then for Karlsruher SC, for whom he played in the U17 and U19 Bundesliga. In the summer of 2017, he moved to SC Freiburg. There he initially played for the U19s and made his Bundesliga debut in a 2-1 home win against Hertha BSC on 9 March 2019. In the summer of 2020, Nico followed the same path as his brother Keven the year before: He was loaned out to Union Berlin and - usually as the left back in a back three - played a major role in Union qualifying for the UEFA Conference League in seventh place. Instead of Europe, however, he returned to Freiburg as agreed. At the end of the 2021/22 season, they finished sixth in the league, reached the cup final  – and Schlotterbeck got his transfer to Dortmund.

“I made a conscious decision to take this step - for the club, the team and the fans. Because I'm a player who needs the fans. They were brutally missed during the Coronavirus pandemic. The Bundesliga has the best fans in the world. That's why it's fun to play in any stadium. And in Dortmund, there are more than 80,000. That's crazy,” he told the members’ magazine Borussia in September 2022, after opening a new chapter in a career that had already taken off in Dortmund just a few weeks earlier. He became European champion with the German U21 team in June 2021 and then made his debut for the senior national team in March 2022. He was part of the Germany squad for EURO 2024 and made several appearances in the competition.