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Season balance sheet of the Bundesliga: The Bavarian Queen

2021-05-25T01:16:47.041Z


The season is over, of course Bayern won the title, but two original clubs have to be relegated. The erosion of the Bundesliga is continuing rapidly.


Enlarge image

The Bavarians celebrate.

You deserve it in every way

Photo:

Sven Hoppe / dpa

Sometimes a look back helps.

To suspect that something is going wrong with this Bundesliga.

You don't have to look far back into the "earlier-everything-was-better" times, just into the year 2010 and into a ranking list that is extremely unsuspicious for football romance: the report of the

Football Money League of

the top-selling clubs in Europe, which the Deloitte auditors created annually.

Eleven years ago, six of the top 30 European clubs were from the Bundesliga - Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund anyway, plus VfB Stuttgart, Hamburger SV, Schalke 04 and Werder Bremen.

Three of them will play in the second division in the coming season.

VfB, the fourth club, happily escaped it last year.

The imbalances in German football have increased massively again in the past decade, and in the past Bundesliga season this has become more evident than ever before.

With Schalke and Werder, two scrapped thick ships leave the Bundesliga, financially badly damaged, sportily worn out.

Thus, a huge fan base is leaving the league in the direction of the lower house.

And with all goodwill for the newcomers who replace them: VfL Bochum is also a Ruhr area club, but it is not FC Schalke.

And Greuther Fürth is also green and white, but not Werder Bremen.

The league is drifting further and further apart

Even more than before, the league will be divided into a group of smaller clubs such as Mainz, Freiburg, 1. FC Union, Arminia Bielefeld with the addition of Bochum and Fürth on the one hand. On the other hand, the major associations and group-driven clubs, FC Bayern and BVB as the two who have at some point earned and earned their wealth and now can hardly do anything wrong in order not to increase it every year. And in their wake Bayer Leverkusen, VfL Wolfsburg, RB Leipzig, 1899 Hoffenheim - these clubs grew up with donors who were made big by donors. The central structure, for which Borussia Mönchengladbach, Eintracht Frankfurt and VfB Stuttgart stand for, continues to shrink.

A table with the clubs that have been in the Bundesliga for the longest uninterrupted period after the relegation of Werder and Schalke has been on the Internet these days.

Bavaria, Dortmund, of course.

Then Leverkusen, Wolfsburg and Hoffenheim follow.

You could say that these are the new traditional clubs.

Leipzig and Wolfsburg will play in the Champions League next year.

No doubt that they deserve it, but also no doubt that they have opportunities that are not available to others.

And just as little doubt that the ratings for the games of these two clubs in the premier class will be significantly lower again.

There is enough material left

The product of top football continues to lose its attractiveness. It wasn't easy this season to sell football without a mood, without fans, without an atmosphere, but it still worked out reasonably well. One or the other will have felt how empty a lot feels in top football without fans. But the production of stories still continued: the Mainz comeback, the Schalke fall from hell, the emotional decline in Frankfurt and Mönchengladbach after the coaches announced prematurely, the diametrical development of the two Berlin clubs - all of this has the Bundesliga story alive held. Fabric is always there.

But what kind of narrative is it when everyone knows how the main narrative ends? It is the ninth championship of Bayern in a row, the Munich enthroned above this league, as eternal and never ending as the Queen over England. In Munich you can change coaches during the season like last year or scare off successful coaches like this season, at the end of the story they don't change anything.

The dominance of Bayern, it has been described so often, after winning the fourth or fifth title in a row.

It has now reached a critical point.

Just as without illusion as it goes without saying, Bayern are more or less congratulated on their title on matchday 1.

Because you know that it has to be that way.

Because the possibilities of FC Bayern are so much greater than those of everyone else.

Because everyone who tries to keep up will eventually run out of breath.

Because those who overestimate themselves and make mistakes end up like Schalke and Werder.

Because in case of doubt Bayern can poach the coach of the biggest challenger RB Leipzig, and the challenger accepts that with a shrug.

How should one solve the dilemma?

Or should you just accept it?

There will never be any self-restraint on the part of FC Bayern, and with the best of intentions one cannot blame the Munich team for that. The Bundesliga title fight would probably only get exciting again if Bayern were no longer part of this league.

Source: spiegel

All sports articles on 2021-05-25

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