It just ended like that. For a month or two, there was the slightest glimmer of hope for the clubs in the Bundesliga. He hadn’t felt it in a while. They didn’t want to admit to feeling it now, not in public: it was fragile, guilty, most likely, but it was hope nonetheless.
Robert Lewandowski was gone. Serge Gnabry, for a time, looked like he might follow. Thomas Muller and Manuel Neuer were another year older. For the first time in a decade, Bayern Munich didn’t seem weak – Bayern Munich never get weaker – but just a little less, just a little more human.
At Borussia Dortmund, at Bayer Leverkusen, at RB Leipzig, the idea would have been formed, unopposed and silent. What if Dortmund’s reinforcements worked? What if Florian Wirtz flourished? What if Christopher Nkunku was only just starting out? What if it was one of those years, in between, the marginal ones, when Bayern fade and another rise?
And then the cold reality infiltrated. Bayern’s first game of the season was at Eintracht Frankfurt: an intimidating stadium filled with rafters cheering on a team that had won the Europa League a few months earlier. This was not a soft start. Not for the first five minutes anyway.
Then Joshua Kimmich scored. Five minutes later, Benjamin Pavard did the same. Then, on his debut, Sadio Mane, and Jamal Musiala, and Gnabry himself, and now the Bundesliga season was exactly 43 minutes, and all hope was extinguished and all was answered. Just like that, for another year, it was over.
Hope is, of course, a little harder than that. No one, not even Bayern Munich, wins the championship in August. Its defeat to Eintracht was only one game away. Perhaps, Julian Nagelsmann’s strategy will go awry in the coming months. Perhaps Bayern’s squad will break into a full-scale rebellion. Perhaps it will suffer from an injury epidemic. Perhaps, as was outlined in this space last week, the World Cup will split the season into two halves, both surrounded by randomness.
Nevertheless, the impression left from that opening day was indelible. Lewandowski’s departure, and the lingering sense of generational change it has created at Bayern, have done nothing to change the power dynamics in the Bundesliga. Its championship fate seems predetermined, if not from the moment the season begins, then certainly from the 43rd minute.
Of course, this has come to be seen as a fatal flaw in German football. Bayern has the most fans, the most commercial influence and the most Champions League prize money, and therefore dominates what now surrounds the absolute. It has won every title for the last 10 years. Sometimes, there is a difference of 25 marks for the nearest contender. There is no drama. There is no doubt about it. Describing the Bundesliga as a competition at the top of the table doesn’t quite feel right.
Germany, at least, is not alone. In France, Paris Saint-Germain started their season with three runs in 38 minutes against Clermont and won 5–0. PSG have won eight of the last 10 available titles in France. Its budget, bloated with Qatari favors, has no ties to any of its rivals. The air is also inevitably thick in Ligue 1.
In theory, of course, this not only reflects badly on these two leagues, but also limits both their appeal and their ambition. Sports, we believe, require two things to fill stadiums, to attract the attention of drifting and distracted television viewers, to retain old fans and attract new ones.
They are related (and often confused) but different. One is what is commonly called competitive equilibrium: the idea that multiple entrants to a tournament can win it in the end. The second is known, academically, as the uncertainty outcome hypothesis: the belief that an individual sport within any given competition is attractive only when fans feel – or at least feel themselves. Can cheat – as if both sides stand a chance.
The best measure of how important these concepts are perceived by the league comes in the form of the Premier League’s deeply hubristic, though undeniably successful, marketing strategy.
In England, the top flight’s sense of self is inextricably linked to the idea that not only can any team beat any other team at any given time, but that it alone can compete with many challengers for the final crown. Claims people.
After all, Germany and France only have one. Spain has a smaller three: Real Madrid, Atlético Madrid, and Barcelona with no pieces sold to sign Marcos Alonso. Italy’s contenders could rise to four these days, but that’s only because Juventus very politely decided to spend three years in self-transplantation.
England, however, have no less than six, a full half-dozen teams that go into the season with a shot at winning the championship that is more than theoretical at least. The reality, of course, is considerably more complicated: not just because some of the six are more equal than others, but also because having a comparatively wider swath of contenders means less predictable seasons but more predictable games.
But truth, in this case, matters less than belief. The success of the Premier League is less, it is largely acknowledged, for the fact that it has fewer processions than all of its rival competitions. It follows, then, that the prospect of yet another season in which Bayern Munich and PSG are vying for their home crowns is a black mark against the league that houses them.
This, to most fans, sounds right. It just feels. Obviously it is a drawback from the start to know which team will emerge victorious. Like going to a movie with all the information that one lover lets the other drown even though there’s plenty of space on the raft, or that the guy is actually a ghost, there’s no point in staying until the end. There has to be a competitive balance. There should be uncertainty of the outcome. After all, that’s what we see.
Except that, as it happens, it doesn’t happen. A paper published in 2020 by researchers at the University of Liverpool – and drawing on a welcome addition of academic inquiry into sports fans’ motivations – found that there was no correlation between how uncertain the outcome of any given game was and how many people watched it. . The link, he wrote, was “decisively redundant”.
It’s not, it turns out, why most people watch sports, whether we want to admit it ourselves or not. According to the researchers, there was a correlation between the number of viewers and the quality of the player in the show. More importantly, however, was the name of the teams involved. The power of the brand, he wrote, was its tendency to “dominate any contribution to audience size”.
Those two findings suggest that, rather than undermine the Bundesliga’s appeal, Bayern’s win did the exact opposite. Here, after all, was a team with a well-known name and an established brand full of highly talented players. Looks like that’s what fans want.
It is this thinking that has convinced PSG to try to blind the rest of Ligue 1 and much of Europe with their sheer star power. This argument is regularly made by the Bundesliga to defend Bayern’s impregnable hegemony. Football’s dirty little secret is that it nurtures dominance, not balance; It craves diversity, but nothing pulls it off like dynasticism.
And yet, there is another finding in that 2020 report that deserves attention. “The match with the highest championship significance observed in our data set would be expected to attract 96% more total spectator size without any implications for the prizes awarded at the end of the season,” even if the teams involved were the same. , the researchers wrote.
In other words, what fans really want – more than the competitive balance, more than the uncertainty of the outcome, more than famous faces and powerful names – is at stake. They want, we want, risk as much as we can get: the game when it seems like everything is on the line. That’s what leagues sell. This is what attracts fans.
Ultimately neither Germany nor France can offer it. Given the distorting effects of Champions League revenue across the continent, season by season in the rest of Europe’s major leagues and some of its minor leagues is becoming increasingly rare.
But that’s what we want, more than anything. Watching Bayern and PSG ride rough on everyone provides a short-term hit, the fleeting satisfaction of awe but at the cost of greater rewards. Most likely, this season there will be no decider in the Bundesliga. There will be no final showdown. How can it happen, when everything is settled in 43 minutes?
difficult conversation
Without a doubt the most horrifying transfer of the summer was not the one in which a troupe of Europe’s biggest clubs searched for Erling Haaland, or Manchester United’s futile pursuit of Frankie de Jong, or even the heartbreak of Real Madrid. Tried, which was rejected by Kylian Mbappe. , Instead, Gonçalo Guedes aims to move from Valencia to the Wolves.
Every move, after all, would have been full of traps and traps and pitfalls. First, the agent who has a close relationship with Wolves’ owners, Jorge Mendes, will have to get in touch with the agent most aligned with Valencia’s owner, Jorge Mendes, to see if the player is interested in the move. keeps.
Next, those agents must reach out to the player’s agent – Jorge Mendes – to see if his client is interested in the move. Geddes must then contact Wolves’ manager, Bruno Ledge, to discuss his role in his new team, probably through Ledge’s agent: Jorge Mendes.
And in the end, politics may have dictated that Geddes express his desire to leave Valencia’s new coach, Gennaro Gattuso. Gattuso, undoubtedly, would have been furious. He tried to sign Guedes only last year, while Gattuso was (briefly) at Fiorentina. This was his chance to work with a player he clearly admires. We can only imagine that he must have expressed his disappointment at losing him to his agent in no uncertain terms. George Mendes.
This article is originally from . appeared in
new York Times,
