Matchday 23 provided the usual, much-loved mix of low-score dross and high-score bonanzas (including Hoffenheim’s 6-2 over Wolfsburg in “El Plastico”, as the Bundesliga afficionado Archie Rhind-Tutt put it somewhat uncharitably).
Teutonically incorrect goalkeeping blunders (see the 1-1 between Braunschweig and Gladbach) and a man in a moose costume stumbling over an advertising board and losing his (moose) head in the process – an instant classic in the sparsely populated/nuclear wasteland area known as German humour.
But amid all that enchanting heedlessness, two matches also provided a real glimpse of clarity, a cold, hard look at the nature of the beast numbered 13/14.
The first one was Bayern v Schalke. Pep Guardiola had praised the Royal Blues as “one of the best teams in the league” before that fixture. He was right, of course, but these days that statement amounts to little more than a backhanded compliment. Schalke, mathematically the fourth best side in the land, were even worse than in the 6-1 defeat by Real Madrid on Wednesday.
This is not an exaggeration. Against the Spaniards, Jens Keller’s men had started reasonably enough and at least troubled Iker Casillas once. But at the Allianz Arena they were 1-0 behind thanks to a deflected free-kick from David Alaba and down and out from the kick-off.
The manager’s idea to line up in deep rows outside the box resulted in Bayern flooding the midfield with up to eight players at a time. Schalke never got close to the ball, let alone into the game. “This was the worst thing I have ever seen,” said Keller (probably not true, strictly speaking). “It was catastrophic, a truly extraordinarily abysmal performance,” he added in relation to the first half. Bayern were 4-0 up at the interval. If it hadn’t been for some fine goalkeeping from Ralf Fährmann it could have been 14.
“We have to be more [like] men,” demanded the goalkeeper after the final whistle, which provided a relatively gentle 5-1 scoreline. But insufficient manliness isn’t so much Schalke’s problem as the huge gap between the undoubtedly talented players in the squad and those who should never share a pitch with Bayern or Real Madrid in the first place. There is enough money available to do much better. The real issue is quality control, in other words, and that pertains to the manager, too.
“We didn’t even get 10% of our tactics right,” admitted Keller. He’s a 60% coach, at best. It’s become painfully obvious that the 43-year-old is unable to get anything like the maximum out of the potential at his disposal, to say nothing about taking Schalke to a different level altogether.
“If we look for excuses now, it’s already a wrong step,” said Horst Heldt when asked about the manager’s (surely non-existent) future beyond May. You guessed it: the sporting director expertly put the blame on the players instead. “You can get to each one of them in the end, the club is always more powerful,” he threatened, “decisions will be made”.
Heldt has become so good at questioning the motivation or ability of employees that he himself has hired that no one has ever seriously questioned his own role in the stasis.
The Peruvian winger Jefferson Farfán (who was seen sharing a joke with his international team-mate Claudio Pizarro after the final whistle) and Kevin-Prince Boateng (“the superstar enjoys all sorts of privileges but was again not fit,” wrote Bild) are this week’s convenient fall-guys, while Teflon Horst escapes scrutiny once again.
Schalke – this is the key point – are not even a club in crisis. They are more or less on course of hitting their targets but the game in Munich made it incredibly easy to see why the Bundesliga suffers from a lack of competitiveness at the very top. The Royal Blues have become specialists in failure under Heldt; the banal but devastating failure to use their considerable resources – they are the 13th richest club in Europe in terms of turnover – in a competent manner. No wonder the league’s a friendly place for the Bavarians, if their potential worst enemies are this feeble.
Leverkusen v Mainz also made for an instructive lesson about everything that is wrong as well as right in German club football right now. Bayer, praised as a “results machine” by Jürgen Klopp in the autumn, have looked a broken side since December. Results are still being produced, albeit those of an exclusively faulty variety. The 1-0 defeat by Thomas Tuchel’s team was the fifth loss in the league in a row for the “Werkself”.
No one is quite sure what is wrong. The coach Sami Hyypia had brought in some psychologists to wake his side from their stupor but the performance on Saturday was the stuff of trauma again. The sporting director Rudi Völler admitted that this was more than a blip. “We have obviously got it wrong with a few players,” he said, “we have to have a better set-up, mentality wise, in the future”.
Leverkusen’s phlegmatic tendencies have been a problem for many years and it’s hard to see how things will ever change fundamentally. Bayer, a company-owned minnow of a club with deep pockets, are aware that the players they attract either see the club as a stepping stone for bigger and better things or are only there for their money. Or both. The kind of player who takes real responsibility and identifies strongly with a club is – by definition – elsewhere. Wolfsburg and Hoffenheim have similar issues.
These kind of clubs will never get to the next level – and stay there – as long as their squads are packed with players who define professionalism as switching off when the probabilities point to a defeat. There are only two ways out of this conundrum. The first is to spend even more money on players who are so much better than the opposition that the lack of motivation will be outweighed by the gulf in quality.
You might call that the “Monaco” option. But none of these teams are in a position to do so. The other way is to find an almost manically motivated manager who infects the side with his own ambition. Christoph Daum nearly succeeded at Leverkusen in that respect.
Talking of managerial talent, Tuchel’s Mainz are the mirror image of the Schalkes, Leverkusens and Wolfsburgs of this league. They have no money but make up for it with an incredible amount of know-how in all aspects. Augsburg could also be mentioned in the same breath but there are natural limits to these sides’ progress, too, of course. They will either lose their best players or their coaches at some stage and will then have to embark on a rebuilding process.
So this is where we are at. The league is incredibly competitive below first place because the biggest, and many of the smallest, clubs have arrived at similar levels of performance but from two very different directions. The former spend fortunes on mediocrity, the latter have managers (and sporting directors) who work wonders with very little.
Seen in this light, Bayern’s peerlessness (and Dortmund’s, to a lesser extent) is neither accidental nor the product of dark magic. They just happen to be the one club/two clubs who have been able to combine huge resources with a comparable level of expertise. It shouldn’t be this rare a constellation.
Talking Points
• Thomas Schneider looked a goner after VfB Stuttgart’s eighth defeat in a row, 2-1 at Frankfurt, on Sunday. “I don’t rule out anything,” the sporting director Fredi Bobic announced darkly but on Monday morning, Schneider was still in charge of training. The Swabians are seemingly willing to give the 40-year-old one last shot at the weekend, when they meet the bottom side Eintracht Braunschweig.
The moose loses his head in the match between Hoffenheim and Wolfsburg. Photograph: Alex Grimm/Getty Images
• One of the league’s worst-kept secrets was revealed on Monday: Armin Veh will leave his position as Frankfurt manager at the end of the season. The 53-year-old would have been able to continue as manager but has seemingly lost interest. “We haven’t talked to any possible successors,” said the executive chairman Heribert Bruchhagen. That’s not quite true, naturally.
• “I didn’t know I was such an egotistical pig,” said Zlatko Junuzovic after the 1-0 win in the “Nord-Derby” against HSV. The Werder Bremen midfielder scored the winning goal to pile more relegation worries on to Mirko Slomka’s side but had managed to waste two more opportunities when it might have been better to pass the ball.
Rafael van der Vaart’s comeback for the away team, meanwhile, only served to proved the doubters right. “He was a discreet runner who hardly got involved in the game,” wrote Süddeutsche Zeitung. Hamburg’s attack was “hapless like Schäferhund without teeth”. To make matters worse, the bite of Slobodan Rajkovic will also be missed in the remaining fixtures. The defender suffered ligament damage in a knee. Two words sum up Hamburg’s predicament: Heiko and Westermann.
Results: Hertha 0-0 Freiburg, Braunschweig 1-1 Gladbach, Augsburg 1-1 Hannover, Bremen 1-0 Hamburg, Leverkusen 0-1 Mainz, Dortmund 3-0 Nürnberg, Bayern 5-1 Schalke, Hoffenheim 6-2 Wolfsburg, Frankfurt 2-1 Stuttgart.
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