Executives at Bayer Leverkusen, the long-running but typically middle-weight German soccer club, have been sending the messages since at least February. Some surrendered in person, a quiet blessing after yet another victory. Others came via WhatsApp, unsolicited and unexpected notes from peers and acquaintances and, to their occasional surprise, traditional enemies.
Football, after all, is wildly racial. Rivals do not readily offer each other encouragement or congratulations. But as the German league season grew, many wanted to praise Leverkusen’s impending achievement: with each win, they moved closer to being crowned national champions for the first time.
And, that meant – just as importantly – that Bayern Munich wasn’t.
Leverkusen will, this weekend, get over the line and end a Bayern league run that spans over a decade. At least they should: All Leverkusen need to seal the title is a win, which could come right after they play Werder Bremen on Sunday, or Bayern lose.
The triumph has been a long time coming, in a sense. the club was founded 120 years ago, in 1904, before the city of Leverkusen technically existed. But in another respect it arrived faster than expected.
Six months ago, the team’s charismatic manager Xabi Alonso, 42, said he would support the idea that his side could only win the league if they were still in contention in April. As it stands, he may claim the title so early that he can’t celebrate it properly: The season is still in full swing and Leverkusen have at least two more trophies to chase.
Whenever the title comes around, the club will host a low-key postgame party for the players and their families at its home ground, the BayArena. However, it will not hold the traditional parade – in which fans will have the chance to salute the players – until May 26, the day after the country’s other major domestic competition, the German Cup, ends. (Leverkusen are favored to win this one as well.)
Organizing this celebration was something of a challenge: Leverkusen, a small town between Cologne and Dusseldorf, does not have a civic building with a ceremonial balcony large enough to allow the team to greet its fans. (The club said it has several options in mind, though nothing has been decided.)
“We will deck our city in black and red wherever we can,” the city’s mayor, Uwe Richrath, said in a statement.
It’s not a problem the club — or city officials — have had to deal with in the past. Founded more than a century ago as a sports shop for workers at the nearby Bayer chemical plant, Bayer Leverkusen has won just two major honors in its long history. The most recent was in 1993.
Instead, Leverkusen has become almost synonymous with agonizing defeat. In 2002, the club took the anglicized nickname “Neverkusen” after missing out on the league title, the German cup and the Champions League, Europe’s marquee football competition, at the final hurdle. This reputation is so deeply embedded in the club’s psyche that Bayer Leverkusen have patented the German equivalent of the Vizekusen.
Alonso’s team will, in the coming weeks, exorcise these ghosts in quite spectacular fashion. His side are yet to lose a game this season and can still end the campaign with more major honors (three) than they have in their entire history.
This achievement has a significance that will extend somewhat beyond its birthplace.
The ceremonial dominance in recent years of Bayern Munich, the country’s biggest and by far the richest club, had become a source of great concern — both for German fans and the league itself — as the annual hunt for the title, the Bundesliga. to seem stale and predictable.
As the many messages that have flowed into Bayer Leverkusen attest, there is little relief in German football at the prospect of a changing of the guard, even if it turns out to be temporary.
“I can absolutely say it’s great for the Bundesliga,” said Peer Naubert, the head of marketing for Bundesliga International, the organization that promotes German soccer abroad. “Having the same champion for 11 years in a row didn’t have a negative impact, but it didn’t have a positive impact either.”
Bayer Leverkusen’s success has allowed the Bundesliga to tell a different story to its international audience. At least some of that can be attributed to Alonso himself: It’s striking, for example, how much of Leverkusen’s social media includes their manager, a beloved former player at Liverpool, Real Madrid and Bayern, three of the most popular clubs in the world.
But the league as a whole also has specific benefits, Mr. Naubert said. “In terms of awareness, interest and the number of avid fans,” he said, citing a metric the Bundesliga uses to describe viewers who tune in regularly, “we’ve seen a significant increase.”
Many more people watch Leverkusen games than in the past, he said, but more people tune in for other teams as well. A corresponding increase was noted in the league’s social media footprint. “There is some freshness, I think,” Mr. Naubert said.
The reaction among fans was two-way. It would be stretching it to suggest that Germany is excited at the prospect of Leverkusen winning the league. The fans are very loyal to their own clubs, and German football is very regional because of that. The club also doesn’t have the wide spread that rivals like Bayern Munich or Borussia Dortmund have, and thus doesn’t intrude on the national consciousness as much as others.
Leverkusen also occupy a somewhat uneasy place in the German football firmament. As an offshoot of corporate behemoth Bayer, it is one of the few exceptions to the beloved German model: the so-called 50+1 rule, according to which fans must be the main owners of their clubs. It’s a longstanding exception, but it’s still an exception.
That status means Leverkusen is “kind of the original sin,” said Dario Minden, a spokesman for Unsere Kurve, a group representing Germany’s organized fans. It is this corporate support, in his view, that has enabled the club to weather the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic better than other clubs.
“The important thing to see is that the only thing that broke Bayern’s dominance was a construct of a giant pharmaceutical company,” said Mr Minden.
But Leverkusen’s prominence is no balm for the financial imbalance that has allowed Bayern to win the league every year since 2012, he said.
Even though Leverkusen are confident they can build on their success – Alonso rejected approaches from both Liverpool and Bayern Munich to stay on as manager next year and the club expect to keep hold of star player Florian Wirtz – is not evidence of a new, fairer dawn for rivals around the league.
As an Eintracht Frankfurt fan, Mr Minden admitted, he does not rejoice in any team other than his own winning the league. “Though maybe that’s because I’m a bad person,” he said.
However, one aspect of the championship has offered him some solace. “We have this nice word,” he said. “Gloat.”
Like much of Germany, Mr Minden may not be actively celebrating Leverkusen’s impending victory. He can, however, take some joy in the fact that it means Bayern Munich, after 11 long years, will once again experience what it means to finish second.
