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Bayern Munich and the Bundesliga

That was fun while it lasted, huh?

This was supposed to be the year when Bayern Munich fell back to the pack. They lost Robert Lewandowski to Barcelona, ​​and you could at least convince yourself that everyone got better or, at the very least, not worse. RB Leipzig had stabilized under manager Domenico Tedesco, held onto stars like Christopher Nkunku and made less-sexy additions (midfielder Xaver Schlager, defender David Raum) around the edges. Borussia Dortmund lost Erling Haaland to Manchester City, but they strengthened elsewhere and brought back Edin Terzic, the coach who helped them storm back up the table two seasons ago. As for Bayer Leverkusen, the youngest team in the league? Well, they hung onto all their stars and seemed primed for some internal improvement.

Yeah, about that. Halfway into their season opener, against defending Europa League champions Eintracht Frankfurt, Bayern Munich won 5-0. They looked better than ever and needed just 45 minutes to offer a definitive “actually, yes” to all the devil’s advocates wondering, “Could they be better without the best goal scorer in the world?”

Watching Bayern steamroll Frankfurt, possession after possession, I couldn’t help but wonder who this was serving. The question of whether the Bundesliga is too easy for Bayern Munich is a settled one. They’ve won 10 titles in a row, already a record across the entire history of Europe’s Big Five Leagues. Instead, the better question, I think, is a slightly different one: What if the Bundesliga is too weird for Bayern Munich?

What’s so weird about it, anyway?

Bayern’s first shot against Frankfurt from open play was the kind of thing that only happens in Germany.

Five Bayern players swarmed Frankfurt’s possession right near the halfway line, but a difficult little one-two broke the Bayern press and freed Filip Kostic down the left flank. The next-closest player to Kostic, a wing-back, was suddenly one of the opposition center-backs, Dayot Upamecano. With one central defender already jumping out to close him down in the midfield zone, Kostic tried to whip an early ball behind the other Bayern center-back and onto the feet of an onrushing teammate. Except Kostic mishit the ball, and it ended up in goalkeeper Manuel Neuer’s hands.

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Since Kostic turned the ball over so quickly, Frankfurt weren’t able to get too many other bodies forward, but Neuer didn’t care; he immediately launched a difficult low throw right up the gut to Jamal Musiala, who turned and then drove the ball 40 yards up the field, in a straight line through and beyond the Frankfurt midfield. All of a sudden, he was bearing down on the final two Frankfurt defenders, with Sadio Mane and Serge Gnabry charging alongside. Musiala played the ball to Gnabry, who attempted a shot from outside the box. It was blocked, bounced back to the feet of a recovering Kostic, who turned upfield and immediately attempted a 60-yard crossfield diagonal that was intercepted by Alphonso Davies.

This passage of play added up to four different possessions in about the span of a minute. In the Bundesliga last season, there were about 103 possessions per team per game. Here’s how the other four Big Five leagues compare:

  • Ligue 1: 93

  • Premier League: 93

  • LaLiga: 95

  • Serie A: 93

It’s a massive difference: In a given game, there are about 20 extra possessions in the Bundesliga compared to Europe’s other major leagues. Is it because of the league’s emphasis on pressing, or because teams like to play aggressively with the ball? Yes — and yes. Per FBref, the average Bundesliga team pressed the ball 158 times per match last season. As for the other leagues:

  • Ligue 1: 152

  • Premier League: 146

  • LaLiga: 145

  • Serie A: 146

The same goes for how teams in the respective leagues create shots. The average uninterrupted possession that leads to a shot in Germany moves the ball up-field at a rate of 2.4 meters per second and it lasts for 7.3 seconds. Everywhere else?

  • Ligue 1: 2.1 m/s, 8.8 seconds

  • Premier League: 2.0 m/s, 9.1 seconds

  • LaLiga: 2.1 m/s, 8.4 seconds

  • Serie A: 2.1 m/s, 9.1 seconds

Although they’re operating under the same rules and recruiting among the same pool of players and competing in the same continental competitions, German teams are interpreting all of those constraints in a very different way than everyone else.

OK, so why does it matter?

With the league all but a formality every season, Bayern have become a fan-owned version of Paris Saint-Germain: a club whose only barometer for success is “Did you win the Champions League or not?” And, well, the Champions League is a lot more like all of those other leagues than it is the Bundesliga.

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2:07 a.m

Arne Friedrich explains why Bayern Munich is hopeful that Sadio Mane can replace some of Robert Lewandowski’s production.

In the knockout rounds of the Champions League last season, matches featured 93 possessions per team, the same number as the Premier League, Ligue 1 and Serie A. For uninterrupted possessions that ended in shots, the ball moved up-field at 1.7 meters per second — significantly slower than all of the Big Five leagues, among which the Bundesliga is the fastest. Those same possessions lasted for 10.8 seconds — longer than in any of the domestic leagues, and a whole 3.5 seconds longer than in the Bundesliga.

Put another way, the average shot-producing possession lasts a full 48% longer in the Champions League than it does in Germany.

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In some ways, this isn’t a question of what’s better or worse; the Bundesliga is just different. It’s a breathtaking way to play soccer, and if you remove the context, the average game in Germany is simply way more fun to watch than in any other league — the risk-reward profile is simply dialed up higher than anywhere else.

But there is also some evidence that it might be worse. In the Champions League last season, only one Bundesliga team advanced beyond the group stages, and not a single one advanced past the quarterfinals. No Bundesliga side made it beyond the quarters the year before, either.

In Julian Nagelsmann’s first season with the club, Bayern picked up the pace, creating shots with possessions that lasted, on average, 9.27 seconds — shorter than any of the 12 years on record — and it led to one of their most dominant domestic seasons yet. Per Stats Perform, their expected-goal differential of 56.88 was their second-best mark since 2010. And yet, they were eliminated by a team that finished in seventh place in LaLiga. They were perhaps unlucky to lose, but “slightly edging Villarreal on xG” isn’t what’s supposed to happen:

For reference, here’s how Liverpool fared against the same opponents:

(Interestingly, when Bayern won the Champions League during the bizarre 2019-20 season, their shot-producing possessions were slightly longer — 11.5 seconds — than their average of 11.2 over the past 12 years.)

The Club Elo rankings, which are determined by results and opponent quality, still have Bayern ranked fourth, but the other three Champions League qualifiers all sit outside the top 15: RB Leipzig (17), Borussia Dortmund (18), and Bayer Leverkusen ( 21). We’ve also seen a number of truly dominant Bundesliga players — most recently Timo Werner, Kai Havertz and Jadon Sancho — struggle to come anywhere near replicating their previous production levels after moving to the Premier League. (It’s worth noting that Luka Jovic also struggled to transition from Frankfurt to Real Madrid, and he’s now set to play for Fiorentina this season after a permanent transfer from Los Blancos.)

A more macro analysis of the situation suggests the same, too. Using VAEP, a metric that rewards players for every action they make based on how much it increases or decreases the likelihood of a goal being scored, the analyst Tony ElHabr looked at what happens when players change leagues. When players from the Bundesliga moved to new competitions between 2012 and 2020, they experienced a decline in output for each of the following leagues: Premier League (17% decline), LaLiga (11%), Ligue 1 (7%), Italian Serie A (5%), Brazilian Serie A (4%), and Portugal’s Primeira Liga (1%).

Looking at it a different way: Players from the Bundesliga have translated as well to the Premier League as players from the English Championship. And when players from the Championship move to the Bundesliga, they tend to produce at the same rate.

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When the ball is always turning over and space in either attacking third is not at a premium, it’s easier to create chances, score goals and just make individual plays. It’s fun to watch — and there’s probably a small economic benefit built into it for most German clubs, too. Individual players often simply look better in the Bundesliga because there are so many opportunities for them to do things that are impossible to ignore. The better you look — and the better your stats — the higher your transfer fee will be, too.

But go back and watch the highlights from the Bayern-Frankfurt match:

Can you imagine a midtable Premier League team leaving all of that space open, all game long? The only team that tried something like that was Leeds under Marcelo Bielsa, and it came close to ending in disaster. While the smaller English clubs have way more money now than their German counterparts, they also approach the game in a different way against the top sides: prioritizing final-third structure and exploiting the space that opens up when their opponents push too far forward.

In Germany, it often feels like Bayern’s opponents try to beat Bayern by doing a version of what Bayern is doing — and it rarely works because when two teams meet on equal terms, the team with the massive talent advantage is going to win in a romp.

So, just a week into the new Bundesliga campaign, it already seems like we’re likely set for a repeat of last season: Bayern Munich are going to destroy everything in their path, but when the Champions League knockouts come around, they’ll suddenly be forced to play a totally different game.

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