There was not much in it before the weekend began but by Friday night one of the most extraordinary records in recent Bundesliga history was guaranteed to remain intact. The 2-0 win over Hannover confirmed Thomas Tuchel’s Mainz as the fifth-best Bundesliga team (by points) since the 40-year-old’s reign at the Coface-Arena began in 2009-10. Only the big four of Bayern, Dortmund, Leverkusen and Schalke have done better in the same period.
It is an achievement that underlines Tuchel’s reputation as one of the brightest managerial prospects in Germany and beyond. But do these numbers also tell us something different and altogether more puzzling about this league? It is not just that all of those second-tier clubs that you would have expected to have done better than little, €20m-a-season-in-wages Mainz have done worse. Most of them are currently where Mainz should be, in terms of financial power: down at the bottom of the table.
It could simply be a coincidence, of course. The league’s volatility over the last few years has been such that at least one of the bigger clubs has always found itself fighting relegation rather than for a place in Europe over the last few seasons. Maybe this year’s cluster-Scheiße of Bundesliga B-list clubs in trouble is just an unhappy coincidence of ineptitude (Bremen, HSV) and inexperience (Stuttgart) at managerial level?
Consider the numbers. Freiburg (16th, €16m) and Braunschweig (18th, €15m), the two teams with the smallest budgets in the league, are where they belong, if you consider the statistically strong correlation of wages and table position in professional football. Frankfurt, who are not quite second-tier but looked as if they could escape their yo-yo team status after their excellent showing last season, on the other hand, have nearly double the budget (€30m) of those two but are only three points off the relegation play-off spot. Eintracht were destroyed 4-0 by a Dortmund side who have started to make up for all the missed chances in the first half of the season.
Like Freiburg, Frankfurt have been suffering from playing in the Europa League but there is also a question over Armin Veh’s appetite to handle a difficult season. The 53-year-old came close to joining Schalke last spring and Frankfurt had started making provisions for his departure. Veh ended up renewing his contract at Eintracht but only for another season. Neither party seems to be too enamoured with the other any more. Augsburg, however, are every bit as impressive as Mainz in 9th with €17m, well ahead of the aforementioned trio of former Bundesliga champions, Bremen, HSV and Stuttgart, who each spend about €35m to €40m on their squad.
Hamburg, who slumped to a 4-2 defeat at Braunschweig on Saturday (the home side had scored only 11 goals all season before) and were so awful that Bert van Marwijk had to be fired, are of course the biggest and most prominent of clubs to have fallen on hard times this season.
Stuttgart and Bremen have been able to hide their own shortcomings somewhat in the Bundesliga dinosaurs’ long shadow. But they willl get their own columns in due course.
Mirko Slomka has been entrusted to save them from the drop after Felix “medicine balls” Magath decided to go to Fulham instead. The former Hannover coach wore a training shirt at his unveiling, presumably in marked contrast to his debonair predecessor, who always looked a bit too much like a retired pilot with his carefully knotted wool-scarves. Slomka’s sartorial message, presumably, was “I’ll be on the pitch with the boys soon” but he came across more like an over-grown mascot.
The 46-year-old did not appear overawed by the job at hand, however. In fact he lightened the mood considerably with a great joke. “This team has been put together excellently,” he said, “the club basically belongs in the top five.” (It was a joke, wasn’t it?) To compound the hilarity, everybody and his dog in northern Germany have now been made aware that “slomka” happens to be Polish for straw, as in clutching for the last one.
HSV’s comeback from the dead will have to occur without the injured Rafael van der Vaart, by the way, which must probably qualify as another piece of good news at this stage. Unfortunately they are up against Dortmund next.
Hamburg’s plight has its specific, long-term reasons but it is probably also instructive for the wider question posed by this year’s league table. Outspending two-thirds of the competition, it seems, is not even enough to guarantee mid-table bliss. The same goes, give or take a couple of million, for Stuttgart and Werder.
In “The Numbers Game” Chris Anderson and David Sally have shown that the correlation between wages and league positions is much weaker if only one single season is taken into account. That makes imminent sense: sheer luck, bad (or good) runs and injuries can negate long-term imbalances in the short term.
But that is not all. If having double the amount of the smallest teams makes no discernible difference to your chances in terms of staying out of trouble, then appointing the right manager becomes all the more important. You can probably still be too big to fail – Schalke’s €80m squad provides enough fire-power to cope with Jens Keller on the bench – but being merely part of the “quite big” posse will not isolate you against failure in the Bundesliga any more.
As a trend this is very good news for the underlying competitiveness of the league, Bayern’s dominance notwithstanding. The smaller clubs, by virtue of being smarter with their money and managerial appointments, have made German top-flight football a game where safety in numbers is simply no longer an option.
Results: Mainz 2-0 Hannover, Dortmund 4-0 Frankfurt, Bayern 4-0 Freiburg, Bremen 1-1 Gladbach, Hoffenheim 4-1 Stuttgart, Braunschweig 4-2 Hamburger SV, Leverkusen 1-2 Schalke, Augsburg 0-1 Nürnberg, Hertha 1-2 Wolfsburg.
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