Saturday 12 May 2012. Not just a disappointing result but the final humiliation in a season full of them. That was the date when Bayern Munich were provoked into becoming the behemoth that clutched the Bundesliga in their grip for more than a decade.
The result was one thing. That it was against Borussia Dortmund, their now-medium-term irritant, was something else. But a 5-2 defeat in the final of the DFB-Pokal, the German FA Cup? It was too much. It recalled the moment in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused when the freshmen Mitch and Carl peek around the door to laugh at the senior O’Bannion after Mitch’s mother backs him off the lawn with her shotgun, as he prepares to give them initiation licks with his bat. Their cheeky late send-off tips O’Bannion over the edge and he promises them revenge amid a tirade of expletives. Similarly, Dortmund’s Pokal final victory lap around a vanquished Bayern made them not just swear revenge but vow to make it long and painful.
Fast forward 12 years and this Saturday teatime Bayer Leverkusen travel to Bavaria to discover how sharply they have poked the bear themselves. Xabi Alonso’s side have so far taken only one Bundesliga title away from Bayern (rather than Dortmund’s two in a row under Jürgen Klopp) but they did it with an imperiousness that even the Rekordmeister (the record champions) have never matched. Leverkusen’s unbeaten 2023-24 Bundesliga season was the first in the competition’s history and a sequence compiled with extraordinary dash. There is a reason why Alonso was Bayern’s first port of call on their long summer search for a coach, and it is only partly because of his playing history with the club. Just winning is not enough for Bayern, and it hasn’t been for a long time.
Yet if Bayern should be aiming (however much they wouldn’t want to publicly admit it) to be more like Leverkusen this season, the truth is that the champions are becoming more like recent incarnations of Bayern. On the surface everything looks good for Alonso and co, with Die Werkself (the Factory XI) second, having recovered from a first Bundesliga defeat in 462 days, by RB Leipzig, with two straight victories, courtesy of eight goals.
The reality is that Leverkusen are leaning heavily on individual talent to paper over collective deficiencies. Florian Wirtz has started the campaign on fire, scoring at more than a goal a game. It’s Ballon d’Or form, though in recent times that award has often been decided on the achievements of the team around the player in question, and Wirtz may be left stranded by a side lacking collective discipline.
The defensive fissures that opened late on last season, with the title won, have become giant ugly cracks. Leverkusen have let in nine goals in the first four Bundesliga games, after shipping 24 in the whole of last season. “Nine goals conceded is obviously too many,” Alonso bemoaned after last weekend’s 4-3 win over Wolfsburg. “If we carry on like this, we won’t have much chance of achieving something big.”
Granit Xhaka is Alonso’s representative on the pitch and he doubled down, unprompted. “We call ourselves a top team,” the midfielder said, “but a top team doesn’t concede three goals in 45 minutes.” Leverkusen’s defensive issues loom large given Bayern’s free-scoring form, with Michael Olise dovetailing brilliantly with Harry Kane et al.
Fortunately Xhaka delivers home truths when they are needed. “We expect leadership qualities from him,” the sporting director, Simon Rolfes, said in the recent Amazon Prime documentary about the club’s record-breaking season, “that he can be unpleasant at the right moment and can bring fire into the team.”
If a swell of aggravation can motivate, there is plenty of needle elsewhere between the habitual champions and the holders. There is the fallout from the Leverkusen CEO Fernando Carro’s leaked criticism of Bayern’s head of sport, Max Eberl, the root of which appears to have been Eberl’s public disapproval of Leverkusen signing Wirtz from Köln’s academy, not to mention the mooted (and protracted) move to Bayern for the defender Jonathan Tah that fell through. Yet Leverkusen know that to continue to build this rivalry, they must tighten up considerably on Saturday afternoon.
