Bayer Leverkusen leads the German Championship

One of the main surprises of the current European football season is the leadership in the German championship of Bayer Leverkusen, which, under the leadership of the Spaniard Xabi Alonso, defeated Eintracht Frankfurt in the next match on its field – 3:0 – and continues to be ahead of the main favorite, Munich, in the standings “Bavaria”. Meanwhile, in the Italian championship, Inter increased their lead from second place, and in the French championship, PSG.

German Championship

The main surprise of the current Bundesliga season, of course, came from Bayer Leverkusen, a club founded in 1904 by a famous pharmaceutical company. This team has never won the German championship, but is now in first place, having not lost a single match after 15 rounds.

Bayer’s current successes are associated with the name of its head coach, Xabi Alonso, a former famous midfielder of the Spanish national team, who won the World Cup once and the European Championships twice. In addition, he is remembered for his performances for Liverpool and Real Madrid, with whom he won the Champions League once, and spent the last years of his playing career in Bayern Munich. For the 42-year-old specialist, who previously coached the youth of Real Madrid and the reserve team of the Real Sociedad club, this is his first experience of independent coaching in a club playing in one of the leading European leagues. Xabi Alonso came to Bayer last October, after Leverkusen suffered five defeats in the first eight rounds of the previous championship, and quickly achieved a qualitative improvement in his game. As a result, the team finished in the top six of the Bundesliga and reached the semi-finals of the Europa League, which allowed Alonso to extend his contract until 2026. And although the Spaniard has recently been increasingly called one of the most likely successors to Italian Carlo Ancelotti, who is due to leave Real at the end of this season, this does not prevent him from continuing to successfully lead Bayer, which confidently beat Eintracht Frankfurt on Sunday.

Without claiming medals in the current championship, the club from Frankfurt defeated Bayern at home in the last round – 5:1. However, in Leverkusen he had difficulty withstanding the balanced play of his opponents, in whose lineup, as usual, the most dangerous was the young striker of the Nigerian national team, Victor Boniface. In the middle of the first half, Bayer’s top scorer took control of the game and opened the scoring with a precise shot into the far bottom corner. The second goal was scored by Dutch national team defender Jeremie Frimpong, and after the break Boniface made an assist to midfielder Florian Wirtz. However, this was the case when even a large score – 3:0 – does not fully reflect the advantage of one of the teams. Bayer could have scored four goals, or five, or even six, if its players had been a little luckier, and the ball had missed the posts several times.

Bayern Munich won exactly the same victory – 3:0 – over Stuttgart, which, having played well in the group stage of the Champions League, is currently second in the German championship, four points behind the leader and with a match in hand. The main fight for gold is, of course, ahead, but Bayer has good prospects in it. Being one of the four youngest teams in the Bundesliga with an average player age of just over 24 years, it ranks second in squad value (€562.6 million), seemingly significantly behind the Munich team (€932 million). However, the stability of Bayer, which did not suffer a single defeat in either the championship, the German Cup, or the group stage of the Europa League, inspires respect. So now the five-time silver medalist of the German championship, who has earned a reputation as an eternal loser, has a good chance to get rid of the Neverkusen nickname, which comes from the English word never.

Italian Championship

The victory in Rome over Lazio – 2:0 – enabled Inter to increase their lead over Juventus, which missed out on the victory over Genoa by drawing 1:1. After 16 rounds, the Milanese club looks like a deserved leader. In the last ten matches, he scored eight wins with two draws and is now four points ahead of his closest pursuer. Inter scored the most goals in the tournament – 39 (15 of them were scored by the championship’s top scorer, Argentinean Lautaro Martinez) and conceded the fewest goals – only seven. Meanwhile, the current champion Napoli is still only sixth, already 14 points behind Inter. The first victory in the last three rounds – over Cagliari with a score of 2:1 – was brought to the Neapolitans by Georgian Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, who scored the decisive goal a quarter of an hour before the end of the match.

French Championship

In the 16th round of the French championship, the clubs that are in the top three scored only one point in total. It ended up being scored by PSG, who conceded a goal from Lille in stoppage time and achieved an away draw – 1:1. “Nice” also lost 1:3 away to “Le Havre” – the team of Russian Daler Kuzyaev, who came on as a substitute towards the end of the meeting, and “Monaco”, without their leader Alexander Golovin, who missed the tour due to too many yellow cards, lost at home Lyon, which is one of the outsiders this season, is 0:1. Thus, PSG’s lead over Nice increased to five points. The goal scored from the penalty spot against Lille by Parisian striker Kylian Mbappe was his 180th in the French championship and allowed him to enter the top five scorers in the entire history of the tournament. Topping the list is Argentine Delio Onnis, who has scored 299 goals over 14 seasons since 1971.

Evgeniy Fedyakov