Bayer Leverkusen’s time has finally arrived.
A 5-0 win over Werder Bremen on Sunday confirmed that German football’s eternal bridesmaids are now the country’s champions. Leverkusen have broken Bayern Munich’s 11-season hold on the Bundesliga and won the first league title in their 120-year history.
Finally, after almost a quarter of a century, they are ‘Neverkusen’ no more.
Leverkusen’s season began high in the Austrian Alps, under the summer rain in Saalfelden. Television cameras trained down on the players from high. Young supporters in replica shirts pressed their faces against the perimeter fencing, murmuring at every sweet touch of the ball or ripple of the net.
On the pitch, Xabi Alonso is not who he was as a player. He used to sit at the base of a midfield, but on that training ground, he prowled the edge of a vast rondo. There were at least 25 players involved and Alonso ratcheted its intensity as the ball knifed in every direction and at wicked speed. All the while, Alonso and his staff barked instructions that echoed between the mountains and hung in the air.
Those were hard, tough days. When they finished, the players would trek back up a country lane, heavy-legged but enlivened, back to a hotel high in the clouds. There was a sense of camaraderie around the camp and a focus.
It was what Granit Xhaka wanted. Xhaka is serious, profound and concise in every language he knows, and he has — in person — a glare that could cut glass.
“I like this coaching team’s intensity,” he told The Athletic in August. “They go full gas every session and that’s how we want to play this season.”
Advertisement
After seven years in England with Arsenal, Xhaka was lured back to Germany — where he played for Borussia Monchengladbach between 2012 and 2016 — by the opportunity to play for Alonso. He would play as a pure ‘No 6’ (holding midfielder) and hold an abstract role in the squad: “I have a feeling that this team is not at its limit yet. This is part of my job — to push the young players to the limit. It’s also to show them where the limit is.”
Simon Rolfes, Leverkusen’s director of sport, spent his summer before Saalfelden bucking trends. Leverkusen are known in Germany as a development club. Signing Xhaka, a player in his thirties, was an atypical move. As were the decisions to bring in Jonas Hofmann (31) and Alejandro Grimaldo (then 27).
Rolfes was happy with the talent levels, but before the 2023-24 season, he was after more structure.
“We needed more stability in certain positions,” he said just before leaving Austria. “We also needed to add experienced players to those we have, guys like Robert Andrich, Jonathan Tah and Lukas Hradecky, and to provide the team with more role models.”
Another club official tells The Athletic (on condition of anonymity to protect relationships) that the side needed more professionalism and togetherness in the dressing room. The recruits were expected to lead by example and break up cliques that formed around groups who spoke different languages and came from different backgrounds. “There was no animosity between these groups at all, everyone got on well. But we needed a more unified team,” the Leverkusen official says.
Xhaka’s presence, leadership and charisma were key to bringing more resilience onto the pitch. “Central midfielders are the heart of every team, they define how the team plays,” Rolfes says. “When we found out that Granit was potentially available, we saw it as a huge opportunity. Xabi and I flew to London to tell him we wanted him to play deeper for us, as a No 6, dictating play and tempo in the engine room. We both joked that we didn’t need to look at stats, videos or scouting reports to evaluate his game — because we had both played against him ourselves on the pitch.”
There was also an important change in the backroom staff. Thomas Eichin, a former player with Gladbach who had been head of the academy at Bayer, was appointed director of professional teams in the summer to relieve Rolfes of many organisational and administrative chores. “Thomas had a very good influence on the team behind the scenes,” the Leverkusen official says.
Advertisement
They also note that the club managed to get their “number one transfer targets in every single position”, a feat that “almost never happens”. Leverkusen added real quality to a side that had already shown plenty of promise in the second half of the previous season, when they made it to the semi-final of the Europa League.
“Our mentality had changed,” the Leverkusen source says. “Before Xabi’s arrival, we had developed a habit of missing many penalties. But when the Europa League play-off game against Monaco went to a penalty shootout, we scored all five to go through. There was a different atmosphere, a different drive.”
There was a sense of something building before this season, too. Jeremie Frimpong, about to embark on his fourth campaign at the club, started to believe that something special might lie ahead.
“For me, that came in pre-season,” says the 22-year-old. “We’d lost some players, but when we started the friendly games, you could see how it was going to be. Nobody really knew each other, but we were still playing really well.
“And then our first game against Leipzig. We played well and I thought, ‘Right, we can do something this year’.”
The season’s opening weeks strengthened that view, showing the instant chemistry Frimpong described. He scored the season’s first goal, combining with new centre-forward Victor Boniface.
In the second game, at Gladbach’s Borussia-Park, it was Boniface’s turn to open the scoring as he headed in after a raking pass from Xhaka had been cut back by Grimaldo. Three new players, one seamless goal.
For Frimpong, that instant understanding — players’ ability to immediately contribute within the team — owed much to the strengths of Alonso’s communication.
“Everybody understands him,” he says. “When he has an idea, he can make it make sense to all the players.
“I always feel like he knows how to use my abilities — like running into space, one-on-ones, counter-attacks. It’s things like that. But it’s like that for everyone. Ask anyone in the team: they’ll all tell you the same thing.”
The inside story on Alonso, the man who ended Bayern’s dominance
- Building a dynasty at Leverkusen
- What happened with Liverpool
- Short passes and half-spaces: How he sets his teams up
Munich on matchday four was where Leverkusen thought they might stumble. The previous season, they had lost 4-0 at Allianz Arena under Gerardo Seoane. Until Alonso’s return to Bavaria, all their improvements felt theoretical. They were assumed to be a minor plot in the story of Bayern’s 12th-straight Bundesliga title.
Advertisement
Initially, the game followed that script.
But having fallen behind to a Harry Kane header, Leverkusen drew on Rolfes’ “role models”. Grimaldo ‘knuckled’ a free kick into the top corner to level the score and Leverkusen began to play with a startling lack of fear. Xhaka, always at ease with the ball, snapped passes around the pitch, and the game changed. Players who had begun fearfully, like a nervous Edmond Tapsoba, became more aggressive and certain. It was the visitors who were making the chances. It was their attacking players — Boniface, Hofmann, Florian Wirtz — who were having the biggest effect.
Even when Leon Goretzka scored with four minutes left — after which the television cameras panned around, finding Uli Hoeness smiling broadly, with everything around him business as usual — the game was not done. Deep into stoppage time, Hofmann buckled under a challenge from Alphonso Davies and Exequiel Palacios scored the resulting penalty. Palacios led his team-mates in a giddy celebration under the away fans in the corner.
A draw, but a victory of sorts — and one attributable to the side’s veteran core.
“Experience is important,” says Frimpong. “You need these types of people in a team and they have helped us so much. They know when to use their experience.
“It’s the little things: they know when to get fouls, or to stop the game when it’s getting hard.”
Rolfes names the 2-2 draw as a pivotal moment in their title-winning season. “It wasn’t just that we came back to take a point late on. We saw that we were competing with Bayern at the same level. It was a top performance against top opponents. That’s when we all realised we could be a real force this season.”
Few clubs in Germany have been jilted as often as Leverkusen. ‘Vizekusen’ (second-kusen) or Neverkusen are tags that came from an extraordinary period between 2000 and 2002. Extraordinary in every sense: Klaus Toppmoller’s side were extremely gifted but incredibly unfortunate. It is difficult to think of another team who went so close to so much but fell short so often and during such a brief period.
Advertisement
In 2002, they were runners-up to Dortmund and Schalke in the Bundesliga and DFB-Pokal, and to Zinedine Zidane’s timeless volley and Real Madrid in the Champions League. The season left a trio of bitter pills to swallow and, in the absence of a trophy — of any kind — to vanquish that pain, the nickname stuck.
Thomas Brdaric played for Leverkusen between 1999 and 2004. He started the 2002 Champions League final at Hampden Park. After his playing career, he coached all over the world — including Germany, India, Albania and, most recently, Kuwait — but still lives in the North Rhine Westphalia region.
“2002 was a long time ago,” he says. “It was a really great time, but just without titles. Sure, it was disappointing not to get there. We had some really bad luck with injuries and if I had to compare it with the team now, that’s one of the areas — they have much more choice in each position.
“And all the players delivered in the right moments, whenever they got the chance to play. It didn’t matter if they were starting or on the bench.”
It has been one of the more subtle themes. Leverkusen’s most well-known players have often been their best — Wirtz has been outstanding, so too Xhaka and Palacios, Tah, and Grimaldo. But Brdaric is right: The most telling contributions have come from all over the squad. Andrich’s form won him his first caps for Germany. Nathan Tella spent the previous year on loan at Burnley in the English Championship but has impressed since signing from Southampton. Amine Adli and Josip Stanisic have been important, and Patrik Schick recovered from a long-term injury just in time to compensate for the loss of Boniface.
Still, that past hung over the season. Allied with Bayern Munich’s recent dominance of the Bundesliga, that Vizekusen moniker spoke to the potential of a slip at any moment. Many within German football expected history to repeat itself.
Those moments of doubt came and went. Leverkusen always had the answers. A 90-minute Tah header beat Stuttgart in the DFB-Pokal in February. An even later Palacios winner secured a league win in Augsburg immediately after the winter break. In Leipzig, Leverkusen went behind twice but fought back before Piero Hincapie scored a 91st-minute winner.
Rolfes recalls Alonso’s half-time talk at Red Bull Arena when Leverkusen were 1-0 down. “We only had 13 available players, half the squad were injured or at the Africa Cup of Nations. Things weren’t going for us.
“Xabi said: ‘I don’t give a shit if we win or lose this game — but we have to go out and play our football now. We have to play Bayer football’. Everyone went back on their feet and came out with renewed confidence. In the end, we didn’t win by stringing 35 passes together but by forcing in a corner. It didn’t matter.
“You could sense in the changing room afterwards that it was a very big moment for us.”
Werder Bremen (2004), Stuttgart (2007), Wolfsburg (2009) and Borussia Dortmund (2011, 2012), the four clubs who disrupted the Bavarians’ dominance in the league in the last 20 years, all beat Bayern during their title-winning seasons. Could Leverkusen overcome their stereotypical brittleness to do the same in February?
Advertisement
“Everyone always thinks that Bayern will find a way to win it somehow,” Christian Gentner, a Bundesliga champion with Stuttgart and Wolfsburg, said before the showdown. “You hear it so much that you start believing it yourself, but when you beat them, you’re no longer in awe of them. You lose that dread.”
Leverkusen were already believers before kick-off, however, according to Rolfes. “We were sure we would win,” he says.
The game — and the 3-0 result — offered an array of contrasts. Carnival season was dawning and the stands at the BayArena were decorated by fancy dress; clowns, boas and fabulousness and, as a metaphor, it was almost too on the nose.
Stanisic scored the first goal, despite being on loan from Bayern, which darkened the mood in Munich, and added to the season-long grumbles about recruiting strategy. Sacha Boey, Bayern’s recent arrival from Galatasaray, suffered terribly at left-back, looking exposed in an unfamiliar position. Tella, who moved to Leverkusen to much less fanfare, had the game of his season down the same flank.
But the freedom and conviction in Leverkusen’s football was the true difference. This was seized upon by Thomas Muller after the game. Muller bemoaned his team’s inhibition — their lack of “balls” in games — before referring to the loss, as a “nightmare” the next day.
“It was much more than a win. We destroyed all of their hopes, and we proved to ourselves that we were the best team in Germany,” Rolfes says. “We had the quality, we got the points, and it was a big psychological boost.”
The win opened up a five-point gap at the top of the table for Leverkusen, who never looked back. Even the uncertainty over Alonso’s future could not derail them. Rolfes continues: “Players have a keen sense for what’s happening by looking at how the manager and the sporting director get along. They saw that we were very relaxed about the situation, talking to each other in an atmosphere of trust and openness.
“We knew all along that Xabi was likely to stick around but it wouldn’t have made a difference if he had said he was to leave at the end of the season, either. We were so dominant in our game, so full of confidence, that we would have won the league either way.”
“There’s been many times when we’ve scored late and we just started to feel like it was always going to happen,” Frimpong explains. “We’d have this feeling that we’re going to score. So, we can be patient. Even when we go down (a goal), we can come back.”
While Bayern faltered and announced that Thomas Tuchel would leave at the end of the season, still unbeaten Bayer won their next eight Bundesliga games to clinch the title in style on Sunday.
“Of the many puzzle pieces that have come together this season, Xabi is a very big one,” Rolfes says. “He’s an incredibly hard worker. He’s top in terms of his coaching know-how but most importantly, his mentality has rubbed off on the players.
Advertisement
“He’s relentlessly focused on the next game, always pushing for improvement. As a former superstar on the pitch, he knows what it takes to perform at the highest level every three days. He has set an incredible example.”
Leverkusen will celebrate the first league title in their 120-year-old history tonight but with a degree of restraint — the prospect of immortality demands it. There is a 2-0 lead to defend in Thursday’s Europa League quarter-final second leg against West Ham United and the DFB-Pokal final against second-tier Kaiserslautern to come, not just a potential treble but the chance to go an entire season without defeat in three competitions.
“This isn’t over,” Rolfes says. Leverkusen, the club that used to be a byword for failure, enjoy winning too much to stop now.
(Top image — design: Ina Fassbender/AFP, Hesham Elsherif/NurPhoto, Rene Nijhuis/MB Media/Getty Images)