All against Bayern in Germany

The Bundesliga champion does not raise a trophy to use;

he raises a bowl or salad bowl in which the names of all the winners are engraved.

Far from frugality, the last ten were raised by Bayern, a

that had needed 20 years to take the previous ten.

Already with those credentials he was considered the great tyrant of German football.

This Friday the race for the eleventh consecutive title begins with a visit to Eintracht, the champion of the Europa League that focuses on the duel of the continental Super Cup against Real Madrid.

“One day the dominance will be broken, it doesn't have to be this season, but maybe in three years.

In any case, it depends on each club.

You can't form a cartel against Bayern," warns Hans-Joachim Watzke, CEO of Borussia Dortmund and chairman of the German Football League Supervisory Board.

His team has been runner-up six times in the last decade and his was the salad bowl the last two times Bayern did not win, in 2011 and 2012. Hummels, Perisic, Götze and Lewandowski all played for that team.

They all passed through Munich afterwards.

Watzke notes several details that distance Bayern from their competitors.

The most obvious has to do with economic potential.

Bayern invests around 330 million euros per year in salaries, twice as much as Borussia.

The competition begins each year with a serious distortion, so the imagination is fired in the search for an imposted equality.

Donata Hopfen, executive director of the Bundesliga, suggested that a

model with semi-finals and a final could be implemented to elucidate the champion among the top four.

Interestingly, Bayern was the one that best assumed this possible novelty.

At least that's how Oliver Kahn, the club's CEO, put it.

Although the honorary president, Uli Hoeness, was quick to describe the idea as "ridiculous".

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Actually, the multiple champion is something else.

“In Germany we are lagging behind the big European clubs.

We need more teams at a higher level in the Champions League”, warns Kahn.

However, in Munich they like to cultivate an image of moderation and have been careful to announce that they will not pay salaries above 20 million per year.

Mané, Neuer, Kimmich and Müller remain on the edge of that limit.

Eintracht's triumph in the Europa League has fueled several debates with a focus on money.

For example, whether it is necessary to abolish the 50+1 (51%) ownership rule that, in theory, prevents the majority shareholding of the clubs from being collective.

Watzke cautions that that won't change any time soon.

"It's something very ingrained," he clarifies.

But in Bayern they believe that the limitation prevents the level of the championship from growing, even though they warn that they will not only not open themselves to a majority investor, but that even 51% take it up to 75% of popular capitalism.

Barely the remaining 25% of the property of the Munich giant is divided equally between Adidas, Audi and Allianz.

The insurance company was the last to arrive, in 2014, and paid 110 million euros for 8.33% of the club's shares.

"It would be good for us if we had four or five teams that could challenge for the title," explains Hansi Flick, the coach and Julian Nagelsmann's predecessor as Bayern coach.

The champion has retouched with Sadio Mané in the position occupied by Lewandowski —in an operation in which he bought the Liverpool striker for half of what the Pole earned— and has invested 115 million euros in three youngsters: the center-back De Ligt;

midfielder Gravenberch;

and striker Mathys Tal, who is listed for more millions (20) than he is years old (17).

“They have signed very well.

No one has such quality in Germany”, summed up former player Lothar Matthäus, who does not always have kind opinions, after the victory in the domestic Super Cup last weekend in Leipzig (3-5).

a few steps behind

The team from eastern Germany also seems to be several steps behind, even though they were the best team in the second round of the last championship, achieved their first title by winning the Cup and retained their star Nkunku, chosen ahead of Lewandowski and Haaland as the best footballer of the year both by the group of footballers and by a panel of more than 700 journalists.

The French attacker closed the campaign with 32 goals and 20 assists in 51 games.

The renewal of Nkunku closed the path of Leipzig to Karim Adeyemi, a striker from the Red Bull factory who scored 19 goals in the Austrian Bundesliga with Salzburg.

He left, in exchange for 30 million euros, for Dortmund, where he was going to alternate with Sebastian Haller, the striker from Ajax called to overshadow Haaland's departure.

But a testicular tumor will force him to undergo chemotherapy treatment for the next few months.

At Borussia there are several projects, such as Bellingham, Kamara, Moukoko or Adeyemi himself.

None of them is over 20 years old, so it doesn't seem prudent to demand the necessary maturity from them to break Bayern's dominance in the short term, which also benefits from the apathy of most of its historical antagonists.

A review of the list of the 12 clubs that have won the League at least once reveals that five of them play in the Second or Third Division (Hamburg, Kaiserslautern, Eintracht Braunschweiger, Nurenberg and 1860 Munich) and three more are regrouping after returning to the recent times to the highest category: Stuttgart.

Cologne and Werder Bremen, who have just risen from the hands of another classic, Schalke 04. Meanwhile, modest without economic muscle such as Union Berlin, Freiburg, Mainz or Hoffenheim are consolidated among the 10 best teams in the country.

All away from Bayern.

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