Bayer became German champions for the first time in the club’s 119-year history
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The 29th round of the Bundesliga gave Germany a new champion. The trophy went to perhaps the most successful club in the country among those that had not previously reached the top. Leverkusen won the title ahead of schedule, defeating Werder Bremen at home – 5:0. It’s a paradoxical event – Bayer simultaneously ended Bayern Munich’s 11-year reign, broke the continental record for longest unbeaten streak and appears to have broken a long-standing curse.
If there is an archetype of a pathological loser club in football, it is Bayer Leverkusen. A rich and prosperous team that doesn’t have a history of big wins. Moreover, it has a history of heartbreaking defeats one step away from triumph.
This time she completed the job. And in the 90th minute of the match, without waiting for the final whistle, 30 thousand incredibly happy fans ran onto the field. Almost a fifth of the city’s population.
Bayer not only won the title, he won it with a special sense of style and with full awareness of his willpower. 43 matches without defeat is a repeat of the record for clubs in the top 5 European leagues in the 21st century.
The Italian Juventus achieved the same achievement in 2011-2012. And it’s scary to say how many times Bayer saved this series. Leverkusen have scored 24 goals after the 80th minute this season. They extended the series over and over again when it seemed that it would surely be interrupted.
The match with Werder, which became the championship, developed according to a pleasant scenario for Bayer. The team quickly took the ball and controlled the game. One of the flashes at the Bremen goal resulted in a penalty, converted by the Nigerian Victor Boniface. The team coped with Werder’s onslaught at the end of the first half. And in the second half, when it seemed that Bayer were losing the threads of the game, Granit Xhaka increased the team’s advantage. Everything became clear at that moment. And in the stands, cardboard copies of the trophy were constantly flying into the air.
The third, fourth and fifth goals confirmed that this team is not afraid of anyone. And, which is especially important for Bayer, he is not afraid of his own shadow.
Before today’s match, the fate of the title was practically decided. It was impossible to squander a 13-point reserve five rounds before the end, regardless of reputation. Even the resume of Bayer, who literally dropped the silver salad bowl from his hands twice at the beginning of the 21st century, could not influence anything. But this does not make the surprise and admiration for Bayer’s feat any less.
The German Championship is a special competition in which the pre-season status of a team means extremely little. There, the order of clubs from fourth place and below is almost always unpredictable. Only the position of Bayern, the absolute hegemon of the league, was unshakable.
Only Leipzig and Borussia Dortmund had a mathematically significant chance of preventing Bayern from winning another title, the 12th in a row. And various analytical bureaus considered Bayer’s chances as insignificant.
The most authoritative – Opta – estimated them at 0.9%. And this despite the fact that Bayer in the 21st century almost never fell out of the cohort of teams vying for the championship.
But there were reasons to firmly believe in Bayer’s eternal failure. All football fans know the offensive nicknames given to Leverkusen: Vizekuzen – hinting that Bayer is second, and Neverkusen – hinting that it is forever. In the 1999/2000 season, the team lost the fight for the title, losing in the last round in a match against the modest Unterhaching. Two seasons later, Bayer went to the treble, that is, to win three tournaments, and experienced something painful – they lost the finals of the German Cup and the Champions League, and in the national championship they took only four points in the last four rounds. And he was left without trophies.
But this season everything worked out for Bayer. And it turned out the opposite way. At the beginning of the 2022/23 campaign, Bayer fell to the bottom of the table and was in the relegation zone after eight rounds of the championship. It was at this point that Xabi Alonso was appointed head coach. The creator of today’s success of Leverkusen then, in fact, had no experience as a coach of any serious club. He worked only with the Real Madrid youth team and the Real Sociedad reserve team. The well-known player in the past is now called one of the favorites for the position of coach of first-tier clubs – Liverpool, Bayern, Real Madrid.
Bayer now faces other tasks: both tournament and strategic.
This season he still has a chance of winning a minor treble. To do this, you need to take the country’s Cup and win the Europa League – the second strongest European Cup. In the German Cup, Leverkusen have already reached the final, in which they will play against Kaiserslautern on May 25. In the Europa League, Bayer has one foot in the semi-finals – after the first leg of the 1/4 finals they lead London’s West Ham with a score of 2:0.
And before the next one, the team needs to retain both Xabi Alonso and half a dozen core players, whom insiders are already escorting to other clubs. But this day will remain blissful for Bayer forever.
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