Cape Town - Borussia Dortmund manager Peter Bosz admits his team were not good enough to progress to the Champions League knockout stage this season.
The BVB suffered a 3-2 defeat at the hands of Real Madrid in their final Group H fixture.
The German side went down 2-0 after only 12 minutes, before Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang levelled matters with a five-minute brace around half-time. However, Lucas Vazquez produced a winner for the hosts in the 81st minute.
Bosz believes his team showed glimpses of quality after a slow start to the game, but in the end they lost and finished third in the group, which means they will now enter the Europa League.
"We started very poorly," he told his press conference after the game, according to ESPN. "But eventually you could see a team that can play good football and work together.
"We also showed that we have a lot of great players and it will be good for Dortmund's future when more return from injury after the winter break.
"We wanted to play more compact and you could see that we were not pushing as high up the field as we usually do. But if you play a bit deeper, you have to be all the more aggressive in those zones. We failed to be that and thus Real Madrid had it very easy to score twice on us.
"Afterwards, we had a lot of scoring opportunities but only converted one in the first half. In the second half, we started well [with the equaliser]."
He added: "I have to say that we are deservedly not in this competition anymore... We want to get back to winning ways."