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Heads down on Schalke: Suat Serdar leaves the field injured
Photo: Michael Sohn / AP
To avoid objections: Of course, the meaningfulness of the table is manageable after three Bundesliga match days.
And yet: The table already reflects the new balance of power within the league.
The clubs would be right at the top: In addition to table leaders RB Leipzig, there are also clubs that were at home at the bottom of the table a few months ago.
FC Augsburg roughly in second place.
Eintracht Frankfurt as third is another example.
At the bottom, however, is a team that is part of the league's inventory.
Despite a historically early release of a coach, Schalke 04 are still at the bottom of the table - and together with fellow sufferer Mainz 05, they will not get away anytime soon.
Bayern, Dortmund, Leipzig as the top teams: that remains untouched.
Behind it, however, there are longstanding hierarchies.
Our four insights from the game day:
First realization: Schalke is a cellar child
Leipzig versus Schalke - that was a class difference.
4-0, and that was still gracious from Leipzig's point of view.
Schalke's managers constantly point out that a registered club cannot keep up with a construct like RB.
They have made transfer expenses of 370 million euros since they were founded.
The fact that Schalke also invested 300 million euros in the same period makes the sporting difference between the two teams more frightening.
Schalke has miscalculated so much in recent years that buying players in COVID times is out of the question.
The new coach Manuel Baum has to work with the staff who have already conceded eight goals on the first two match days.
His attempt to stabilize the team defensively with a 5-4-1 system only worked for the first few minutes.
Baum can manage the existing deficiencies, especially in the wing positions.
With Alessandro Schöpf, Baum put on a new right-back.
He was defensive against Leipzig's Angelino as lost as Sebastian Rudy on the first two game days of the season.
In the direct encounter, the Schalke fans once again painfully realized how far their club is now from the top teams.
In the previous season, Schalke won 3-1 in Leipzig.
That seems like forever.
Second insight: Augsburg is the new Schalke
In the Bundesliga hierarchy, Schalke must now also line up behind FC Augsburg.
So the club that has been a candidate for relegation every season since its promotion to the Bundesliga in 2011.
FC Augsburg is the former club of the current Schalke coach Manuel Baum.
It is interesting that FCA is now more attractive to some players than FC Schalke.
For example for Daniel Caligiuri.
In Gelsenkirchen, the wing runner always felt undervalued.
Augsburg gave him the desired appreciation - and a salary that Schalke did not want or could not pay.
The footballing perspective is unlikely to have led the German-Italian to the south.
The FCA is just as defensive as Schalke did in recent years.
Stand compact, let the opponent have possession of the ball, close the center with two close chains of four: With this football, FC Augsburg wants to keep the class again this year.
After three matchdays, no team has collected less possession than the Augsburg team - and no team conceded fewer goals - namely only one.
In the 0-0 draw against Wolfsburg, Caligiuri, like all his team-mates, did excellent defensive work.
After three match days, Augsburg's newcomer is among the 30 players with the longest running distance - and thus ahead of all Schalke players.
The fact that such a player would rather sacrifice himself for Augsburg than for Schalke demonstrates to some extent the new hierarchy of the league.
Third insight: Bremen remains down
If you look at the bare results, you are inclined to relocate Werder Bremen in the Bundesliga hierarchy where they belonged for many years: higher up.
The 1-0 success over newly promoted Arminia Bielefeld washes the Bremen to seventh place.
For the first time in over a year, Werder managed to win two Bundesliga games in a row.
However, if you look at the how the Bremen win, some evidence can be found for the thesis: Bremen is in the lower half of the Bundesliga hierarchy.
The Bremen team gained just 36 percent possession against Bielefeld - in a home game against a promoted team, mind you.
What went through as a clever defensive strategy against an offensively harmless opponent in the first half mutated into a farce after the break.
Arminia played pass after pass and came closer and closer to the Bremen penalty area.
In the end, Werder's goalkeeper Jiri Pavlenka saved the win.
Bremen's offensive harmlessness stood out again.
They played counter football without setting a single reasonable counterattack.
The attackers were in midair.
Florian Kohfeldt breaks his promise to bring back the typical Bremen offensive football of the Thomas Schaaf era.
At the moment Werder is playing more like in the dark years after Schaaf.
How deep Werder has sunk in recent years is underscored by their activity on the transfer market: With captain Davy Klaassen (to Ajax Amsterdam) and striker Milot Rashica (probably to West Ham United), Werder has to sell two top-class players.
Not primarily to become active in the transfer market;
According to "Weser-Kurier", the sales are necessary in order to remain liquid in the coming months.
This is the new Werder reality.
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Florian Kohfeldt and striker Niclas Füllkrug: offensive harmlessness
Photo:
Oliver Hardt / Getty Images
Fourth realization: Leipzig's new structure
After just three match days, RB Leipzig is where the club has been since it was founded eleven years ago: right at the top.
In Leipzig they should find with great relief that their offensive game works without Timo Werner.
Nagelsmann does not even try to replace the international striker who has migrated to Chelsea one on one.
Instead, the Spaniard Dani Olmo played in the storm;
not a penalty area digger, but rather an attacker of the brand false nine.
The agility of the offensive players was the big plus of the Leipziger.
Schalke's newly formed five-a-side chain couldn't keep up when Olmo swapped positions with Emil Forsberg and Christopher Nkunku.
For a 4-0 victory, Leipzig didn't need the services of the newly signed penalty area striker Alexander Sørloth.
Another insight from the RB perspective: You can dominate a game.
Already in the 3-1 win against Mainz on matchday one, they impressed in the ball possession game.
Nagelsmann brought this new facet to Leipzig - and could help to consistently score against the basement children of the league.
As a top team has to do.
Icon: The mirror
