Bayern Munich fans can’t catch a break. When they lose, the rest of Germany celebrates, when they win they end up on Twitter and inevitably find themselves having to defend the legitimacy of their team’s success. As one fan of the Bavarian club put it to me on Sunday evening, “Ours must be the only league where we want our ‘rivals’ to do well week in, week out…” And they weren’t wrong.
As if determined to prove last week’s newsletter - in which I made the case for the rest of the Bundesliga to pull their socks up and stop underperforming - true, RB Leipzig, Bayer Leverkusen and Borussia Dortmund all did a fantastic job in making my point for me: the only competent German clubs outside of Munich seem to reside in Freiburg and Köpenick at the moment. If there was a Bundesliga title race, it was over before it really got started.
However, there’s much more to this than simply lamenting Bayern’s dominance of the league. Cursing the gods for the arrival of Sadio Mané and that man mountain from the Netherlands is one thing, but Dortmund’s implosion against Werder Bremen is a mini-crisis in its own right. In other words, the Westfalenstadion side have been absolutely pants so far this season and now may be a good time to figure out what’s gone wrong.
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