There is a crisis in Bavaria right now, one so seismic it transcends the Alps and has people talking in whispers across the entirety of Europe.
Bayern Munich have lost three games in a row.
Should anyone wish to illuminate just how phenomenally successful and formidably dominant Die Roten are as a football club there is a book’s worth of achievements that can be offered up as definitive proof.
There are the six European Cup/Champions League triumphs. The 33 Bundesliga titles. The 83 meaningful trophies – or replicas of them – glittering in their spacious trophy room.
There is Bayern’s ability and propensity to hoover up the best talent in Germany, forever maintaining their might, while rivals who dare to challenge them are weakened for their temerity.
Yet perhaps what best highlights their immense stature is a recognition of how we – we being the footballing world – responds to the slightest loosening of their iron-clad grip on domestic affairs.
Around the globe there is pleasure being taken in their suffering, and if only the Germans had an appropriate word for that. There is a widespread hope that Bayer Leverkusen can stop Bayern making it 12 titles in a row.
Presently the Bavarians are 9/2 in the football betting and it’s hard to recall when they were last attributed such long odds.
Moreover, how Bayern themselves are dealing with their predicament is revealing.
Thomas Tuchel is leaving at the end of this campaign. The club is undergoing an identity crisis. And all this from losing just three games in a short period of time.
On this day in 1900, this usually all-conquering behemoth was born and it wasted little time in laying down markers for who they would become.
Founded after a Munich gymnastics club were prohibited from having its members join the DFB (German Football Association), Fußball-Club Bayern München blitzed everything put before them in the regional leagues, growing in prominence all the time until they joined the newly formed ‘Kreisliga’, a league that took in the whole of Bavaria.
There they remained for several years, winning trophies intermittently and seeing their stars represent the national side, before switching up to the ‘Oberliga Sud’, their home until the Bundesliga was formed in 1965.
It was soon after this juncture that Bayern became Bayern, the redoubtable machine that we know of today that dominates leagues and the sport betting alike.
Regarded as their ‘Golden Year’s the nineteen-seventies brought Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Muller, and continental glory three times over with the European Cup won, then retained again, and again.
In the league meanwhile, their first title was secured in 1969, beginning a monopoly that hasn’t let up since. Remarkably, Bayern have finished outside of the top two on only five occasions in the last forty years.
Spain has two behemoths in Real Madrid and Barcelona. Scotland has Rangers and Celtic. Italy has Milan and Juventus. Germany only has Die Roten reigning supreme.
Which is just as they like it, this most self-assured and somewhat arrogant of institutions. A club that knows that it is feared, and knows that it is hated, but wouldn’t have it any other way.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to Alamy*
