That success is of course a great credit to Bayern. It has long been Germany’s largest, richest and most glamorous team, but has been hampered for years by its supernova streak. The combustible mix of powerful players, superstar managers and bickering executives would so reliably self-destruct that the club became known as FC Hollywood. Consumed by infighting, it would occasionally allow one of its rivals – Dortmund or Werder Bremen or VfB Stuttgart – to sneak in and claim a championship.
Bayern’s ruthlessness over the past 10 years can therefore be explained by his ability to control his taste for self-immolation. Bayern hires the right coaches, signs the right players, cleverly appoints alumni to illustrious positions behind the scenes. It has, as Fernando Carro, Bayer Leverkusen’s CEO, said, “over the years, it has done an excellent job”. Bayern is what happens when big teams are managed well.
And that is a good thing, as the rulers of German football have long argued. Executives of the Deutsche Fussball Liga, the Bundesliga’s governing body, have long presented Bayern’s dominance as an advantage for the league. Bayern’s virtue, the theory goes, not only serves as an advertisement for German football, but it also exerts an attraction on the league itself, helping everyone to follow in its wake.
Dario Minden, the vice-chairman of Unsere Kurve, an umbrella group representing the interests of game-day fans across Germany, does not agree with that analysis. “It’s not that they don’t make mistakes,” he said. “They do. They make big mistakes. It’s just that they have such an advantage that they can afford to make mistakes.”
In his view, there is no great mystery as to why Bayern continue to win. “The crux of the problem is that Bayern’s annual budget is $380 million and Dortmund, the second richest team, has a $270 million budget,” Minden said. “Then there are small teams, like Greuther Fürth, who work with $19 million.”
