No tension in the title fight: Great injustice: Bayern are not solely to blame for the plight of the boring league
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FC Bayern is inexorably heading towards its tenth championship in a row. In the Bundesliga, boredom, inequality of opportunity and a lack of competition are lamented more vehemently than ever. It would be too simple to just dump the misery of the league on the Munich team.
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Uli Hoeneß could only be heard, not seen, because his words came from a podcast which, appropriately, also bore his name: “11 Life – The World of Uli Hoeneß”.
There Hoeneß shouted rhetorically: “Should we stop operations now so that the Bundesliga is exciting again, or should we play with ten men in the future? I am also not happy when I see that not much can happen when we 1 : Lead 0. I don’t like that either. ”
But, that was somehow the subtext: Then the others just have to try harder. So.
FC Bayern was always the benchmark – but still had opponents
FC Hoeneß, sometimes known in professional circles as FC Bayern, has won every Bundesliga championship since 2013 and has also won most of the DFB trophies. For the Christmas break in 2021/22 he is heading for the tenth national championship in a row with a nine-point lead. Perhaps the crude imbalance is best illustrated by the fact that there are fewer points (12) between third-placed Freiburg and third-bottom Stuttgart than between Freiburg and Bavaria (14). “The gap is big,” noted Bayern coach Julian Nagelsmann.
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The outgoing DFL boss Christian Seifert recently described the Bundesliga as “the last big topic that brings people together”. A daring thesis in times that fatalistically tell of the boredom league and broken competition. More and more people are turning away. Football is played every day, and in the end Bayern win (except in Mönchengladbach).
The Bundesliga has existed since 1963. The Munich subscription champions have landed 30 championships, a total of 31 (for the first time in 1932). They were always the benchmark in the aegis Beckenbauer, Breitner, Matthäus, Kahn and Schweinsteiger, but at least they had competition, Gladbach and Cologne, Bremen and Hamburg, Dortmund and Schalke. In between, Leverkusen or Stuttgart were annoying, and later even a club called VfL Wolfsburg. After two BVB titles in 2011 and 2012, the red mother ship had had enough.
FC Bayern is easy to blame for league boredom
It’s pretty easy to accuse the outrageously powerful and rich FC Bayern of monoculture at the top and the prevailing great injustice in the league.
This Mia san Mia! This hubris! This Hoeneß!
And then this behavior of constantly humiliating those upstarts who dare to harass Bavaria. This summer it was the people of Leipzig. They lost coach, captain and head of defense in one fell swoop to Munich. But: is that to be chalked to Bavaria or Leipzig? From an RB perspective, he would not have let Nagelsmann go for 125 million, said football expert Thomas Wagner in our podcast.
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Munich can’t help it being the ideal (soccer) location: a very wide catchment area, a lot of current assets, very close ties to business and politics. Others groan about the lack of a championship race, FC Bayern longs for the Champions League, the Bundesliga is cosmopolitan for them and Big Player but become too small. “We are the third most valuable club in the world and have quadrupled our value in the last eight years,” said the recent annual general meeting, and if a fanfare had sounded, no one would have been surprised.
FC Bayern Munich acts like any other market participant in a capitalist system. He tries to maximize profit, head start, growth with pronounced selfishness. That’s what companies are like, and of course every football club is first and foremost: a company. “We also want stronger competition in Germany,” said Bayern President Herbert Hainer at Sport1. “But we cannot weaken ourselves.”
FC Bayern hurried away with trends and tricks
Only the market or the rule-makers could do that, or: the so-called competition. It would be too simple, undifferentiated and unfair to stubbornly dump the league misery on the arrogant, possessive Bavarians. Munich does not exclusively have a favorable location, see Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt; But while the Bavarians did a lot of right things with trends and tricks in the last few decades, the rest often overlooked opportunities, risks and side effects.
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That the popular story, according to which young manager Hoeneß was looking for innovative revenue opportunities in America, has already been told many times, doesn’t make it any more wrong. Over the decades, FC Bayern has pushed itself to become the only global brand in the Bundesliga, indirectly supported by applicants who could not prevent someone in front from running away – and who also benefited eminently from this workhorse. The overall level of German football might not have been that high without FC Bayern.
With the triumph of private television at the latest, the big ones got bigger and Munich the biggest, at some point inviolable – business practices on the limit of good taste included. Around the turn of the millennium, they took in around 20 million through a secret TV contract. Hoeneß nonchalantly fed Bayern’s antipathy: “The others were just annoyed that we were number one and not them and got this opportunity.”
Nobody divides the football country like Bayern, and they love that. “We once discussed whether we should try more to help those who don’t like us,” said Karl-Heinz Rummenigge. “But we decided against it. People should discuss us in the workplace. That benefits our brand.”
Thomas Müller’s goal celebration says it all
In a game, for a moment, Bayern can always be beaten, that was and will remain that way. In this Bundesliga season they lost silly to Frankfurt and earned money in Augsburg; the 0: 5 in the cup against Gladbach was an incomprehensible system crash.
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In the long run, however, they will prevail nationally. The money is a factor. But not the only one. It means something when ambitious Thomas Müller celebrates a goal to 4-0 after two triple triumphs, a world championship and a total of almost 30 titles as energetically as one at the beginning of his professional career. This is one of the reasons why Bayern are the best: Because the mentality of many clubs does not come close to being able to keep up in the long term. And because in Germany – of course – they have the most means to afford players who embody this never-ending source of greed.
This is of course not a German problem, but a European one. The Champions League, which has existed since 1992, has jazzed itself up to the money printing machine, and an elitist group can help itself: Anyone who has made it into this phalanx can hardly be ousted so quickly (unless your name is Barcelona). In the current Champions League campaign alone, FC Bayern earned almost 80 million euros – after the preliminary round.
Champions League only requires national differences
So the gap is widening and widening, in fact a super league has long since emerged in football, a kind of closed society that only creates the national divide: to Bochum and Bielefeld, but also to BVB, which recently had sales of 360 million and over 70 million Posted loss. Bavaria took in almost 155 million less because of Corona and still made a mini profit; the turnover was 644 million. “If I increase our budget from 150 to 300 million, then I believe that we are competitive,” said BVB boss Hans-Joachim Watzke at “Bild”. Actually?
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“The success of FC Bayern has to be explained in terms of more than just money,” interjected Hainer. “We manage to keep Kimmich and Goretzka, although there are enough offers from abroad.” And although the Bundesliga is increasingly losing quality in an international comparison. In the UEFA five-year ranking, Germany is fourth behind Italy, the performance in the Europa League is historically cruel, in the Champions League Wolfsburg failed to Lille / Salzburg and Dortmund to Amsterdam / Lisbon.
World champion captain Philipp Lahm spoke in the “Stern” in 2017 about the weakness of the Bayern competition: “The financial situation in the league was not so different in the years when we finished second or fourth. If we were after 25 matchdays Having a 13 point lead means that other well-positioned clubs like Schalke or Wolfsburg have not positioned themselves to win consistently. “
“HSV would potentially be the only Bayern competitor”
Schalke 04, the runner-up in 2001, 2005, 2010 and 2017, has maneuvered into the leaden second tier and is currently in the process of reducing its total liabilities to below 200 million. Consequences of blatant mismanagement. In the lower house, Schalke meets Hamburger SV, currently 56 million in sales and 51 million in debts, as well as Werder Bremen, which avoided bankruptcy thanks to a bond and bank loan. They don’t annoy FC Bayern on the pitch like they did in the 80s, 90s and 00s. They watch on the TV set and should they step up again, they are an underdog.
Ex-national player Stefan Effenberg is actually convinced that HSV would be “potentially the only competitor for Bavaria” because of the “stadium, environment, opportunities”. In this way, however, Augsburg, Bochum, Bielefeld, Union and Fürth made use of the mistakes made by the traditionalists – which, with all due respect, makes the Bundesliga hardly more attractive for the masses or more demanding for Bayern. It’s like a self-reinforcing pull, especially with Corona, ghost games, low tension and a football circus that goes crazy anyway. It goes without saying that the people are grieved.
Incidentally, in the podcast, Uli Hoeneß suggested abolishing the 50 + 1 rule, which is so sacred in Germany. Which, roughly speaking, would mean that associations could open up to external investors. “I would be in favor of it falling,” said Hoeness. “Hanover, Nuremberg, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Bremen – if they played there again, the Bundesliga would be different again.”
And in the end, Bayern won.
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