Bayern's Bundesliga? So just watch the cup!
One competition is becoming decreasingly meaningful in Germany. Could another earn meaning as a result?
Welcome to the 27th newsletter of the season on the 31st matchday. It’s not quite one a week and I’ve had a poor Rückrunde but I don’t think it’s bad going.
I’ve got two newsletters in one this week, with the Bundesliga title set to be decided and the DFB Pokal semi-finals taking place during the week …
Bayern Munich will probably make it 10 Bundesliga titles in a row on Saturday — if not, they’ll do it during May instead — and they are showing no signs of slowing down. StatsBomb data on FBRef goes back to 2017/18 for the Bundesliga and it tells us Nagelsmann’s Bayern are even more dominant than any Bayern side has been for years.
The only time a title race has existed in those seasons was 2018-19, which is also the last time Robert Lewandowski looked human. He scored 19 non-penalty goals that campaign, before going on to net 29, 33, and 27 (so far) in the seasons since. Dortmund, meanwhile, enormously outperformed xG in a year where Bayern, very unusually, didn’t.
Football can throw up weird things like that and Bayern’s quality usually means bad spells don’t matter much. In 2020/21 they actually had a worse xGD than RB Leipzig but they still won the league comfortably, helped along by the fact they took four points from the two games against RBL. Bayern went on a long run of winning close games and the title was sealed before they took their foot off the gas.
And Bayern under Nagelsmann are only likely to stay dominant. Last year I wrote about the Nagelsmann Effect and why Bayern would only get better under a superb coach. Here’s the TL;DR version taken from that piece:
There’s not much room for improvement from 2.39 points per game but Nagelsmann has, so far this season, found it and put the team at 2.4ppg in the Bundesliga. Win the remaining four games and that will jump to 2.47ppg and they’ll end the season on 84 points. That would be the joint-fourth highest tally in Bundesliga history and the seventh time in 10 years Bayern have cracked the then-Bundesliga record of 81 set by Jürgen Klopp’s Dortmund in 2012.
So thank goodness for SC Freiburg. Dreams can still come true.
The Super League argument that came just over a year ago centred around the point that football must always be about mobility. The sacred pyramid system that ensures anyone, from anywhere, can go all the way one day as long as they’re good enough, smart enough, and lucky enough. That feels impossible in the league, at least compared to how it once was, but cup competitions can become our solace as the gap between the haves and the have nots continues to grow.
Freiburg have proven as much.
Currently tussling for fourth and the maiden Champions League campaign that would bring, a first ever DFB Pokal semi-final win in midweek gave die Breisgauer cause for celebration. Before 1993 they had never played in Germany’s top flight. They became a yo-yo side over the next two decades, suffering relegations (1997, 2002, 2005) and enjoying promotions (1998, 2003, 2009) with regularity.
In 2013 they played in Europe for the first time, in 2015 they were relegated again but stuck with Christian Streich to bring them back up immediately. And now they are 90 minutes away from silverware.
They beat Hamburg — German football’s poster boys of what not to be — in Tuesday’s semi-final. For all the complaining German football fans do about RB Leipzig, Wolfsburg, Hoffenheim, Bayer Leverkusen, whether or not those clubs should be allowed to exist doesn’t excuse the mismanagement that has taken place at some of the country’s biggest clubs over the past 10 or 20 years. Hamburg, Bremen, Schalke only have themselves to blame for their demises.
Especially when a club like Freiburg can rise to the very top with a net transfer profit of €49m over the past 10 years.
Whatever romance is left in German football is left in the DFB Pokal, where miracles can still happen, and Freiburg will face RB Leipzig — another club without major silverware in their history — in next month’s final. Leipzig’s own story is well known and they came from behind to beat Union Berlin, who have enjoyed a rise not unlike Freiburg’s, and reach a third final in four years. They’re yet to win one.
The fact that that fixture has been set the same weekend Dortmund face Bayern in a game with no weight to it can’t go unmentioned. If it’s drama, unpredictability, dreams that fans of German football are looking for, the cup is the place to find it. Maybe it’s the only place to find it nowadays.