quantumofsport.com

The various shades of Bayern Munich

quantumofsport.com chum Mr Percy makes a special guest appearance, wondering if he was seeing things when he caught highlights of Bayern v Roma...

Bayern Munich must be one of the most confused clubs in the world. Changing kits and tinkering with designs is nothing new - Milan are playing in (historically inaccurate I might add) wider stripes of black and red this year; Lazio have experimented with more white on their sky blue over the years; Newcastle had some weird asymmetrical, gradually widening stripes a few years back; Spurs have blue shoulders this season and Man Utd had a chevron last year, to name but a few. However, while these all represent a variation on a theme, the fundamentals of the clubs’ colours remain. With Bayern however, I now have absolutely no idea what their colours actually are. In the last 15 years or so, I've seen Bayern teams play in blue and red stripes, red and black stripes, red and white stripes, black and red hoops, red shirts with some black trim; red shirts with blue trim; red shirts with white trim.... I can tell that red is a recurring factor, but surely a club of Bayern's stature should have a better idea of what their colours actually are?

Any help from Bundesliga experts would be appreciated. Just putting it out there...

Mr P

Robert Enke – a tragedy for all

German national goalkeeper Robert Enke was buried yesterday, 5 days after he committed suicide. It was a piece of news that shocked a country – and 40 000 attended a memorial service at the Hannover 96 stadium yesterday, with some of the proceedings shown live on TV, and the service being the top story on all the news bulletins yesterday.

Last Tuesday evening, 32-year-old Enke walked in front of a train. The following day, his wife gave a press conference confirming that he was suffering from depression – and had been, on and off, for 6 years – and was desperate that it did not become public. Having lost a 3-year-old daughter with heart failure a few years ago, he was scared that the authorities might take away their 7-month-old adopted daughter, if news of his illness got out, it seems. This medical condition was something that he had managed to hide from his team-mates – and parents – not to mention the general public. In fact, that was perhaps the greatest shock of all, because Enke seemed to be a sports personality who stood out from the rest, as bright, intelligent, and with his feet very firmly on the ground.

The Player
Robert Enke was a superb goalkeeper. Not the tallest keeper in the Bundesliga, but possibly the most agile, the most consistent and, arguably, the most fearless. Germany has a habit of naming its number 1 goalkeeper and sticking with him. (Klinsmann decided 6 months before the 2006 World Cup that Jens Lehmann would be the Number 1 – ahead of Oliver Kahn.) Even with a plethora of good German keepers – Butt, Adler, Neuer, Wiese, Weidenfeller, Schäfer – there was no great controversy when Manager Joachim Löw plumped for Enke to replace Jens Lehmann – and Enke deserved the status of Number 1. Even though he’d been out of action with a virus infection, and Leverkusen’s young René Adler had played brilliantly against Russia to secure German qualification for the World Cup, most people seemed to assume that Enke would still be the Number 1 in South Africa next year. In the annual vote by Bundesliga players, organised by the Kicker magazine, he was voted best goalkeeper in the league in at least 2 of the last 5 years.

Having learned his trade with Carl-Zeiss Jena and played a handful of games in the 2nd Bundesliga, he moved to Borussia Mönchengladbach in 1996, and made his breakthrough in the 1998-99 season where he was absolutely outstanding in a particularly poor team. They finished bottom of the league, but would probably have been relegated by Christmas if it weren’t for him. He then moved to Benfica (trained by Jupp Heynckes), where he played 77 games in 3 years – picking up the language quickly, and emerging as captain. From there he moved to Barcelona in 2002/3, where things didn’t go so well. He only got a handful of games – and so went on loan to Fenerbahce at the start of the next season. In Istanbul, however, he only played 1 game – a disastrous 3-0 defeat, at the end of which his own fans pelted him with missiles and booed him off the pitch. He decided that was enough, and had a few months out of contract before finishing the season in the Spanish 2nd Division with Tenerifa. In July 2004, he returned to Germany, signing up with regional club Hannover 96. Within a couple of years he was their captain, and their most important player – only ever missing games from injuries picked up through his own bravery. After the 2008 European Championships in Austria-Switzerland, he broke into the German national team, and, when fit, was first choice in the qualifying games.

In recent years, he was linked with moves to bigger clubs – and the chance to play in the European competitions – but he turned down moves to 1FC Nürnberg after they won the Cup, and Bayern München, it seems - preferring to stay in the more provincial, modest surroundings of Hannover.

The outpouring of grief – the German national team cancelled a friendly against Chile scheduled for Saturday, because they couldn’t face playing – is unprecedented in Germany. The whole city of Hannover seemed to go into mourning, when the news broke, with candlelight vigils outside the stadium and a silent procession around the city last Wednesday. Never have so many people attended a memorial service in Germany. Parallels have been drawn with the situation after Princess Diana’s death in the UK.

The Bundesliga is back: how the 2009/10 season is shaping up

Unlike the English Premiership, and the leagues in Spain, Italy and many other countries, the new German Bundesliga season has got under way with maybe 8 or 9 teams, i.e. half the league, in with a chance of winning the title. Although Bayern Munich remains the bookmakers’ favourite (by some distance), at the start of the season the bookies reckoned teams as obscure as Hoffenheim had more chance of taking the title than Aston Villa or Manchester City in England, or Fiorentina in Italy. After all, Wolfsburg came from nowhere to win it last year. Indeed all German neutrals were delighted that Bayern started the season so poorly under their new coach Louis Van Gaal (2 points from the first 3 games).

One thing football fans often forget is that the German League is in fact the best supported league in Europe in terms of crowd numbers. Logical, I suppose, as it also has the biggest population. In the build up to the World Cup in 2006, many of the leading stadiums had a facelift – and Bayern Munich and Borussia Mönchengladbach built brand new stadiums – and many of them (Dortmund, Hamburg, Köln, Schalke) have an atmosphere as good as anything in the Premiership. However, this advantage has been lost to the better TV deals negotiated in England, Spain and Italy, which allows those clubs to buy the best players, and leaves the Bundesliga punching below its weight. (Things are slowly changing though, and it is interesting to note that for the first time this season only 5 of the 9 Bundesliga games take place at the traditional 3.30pm Saturday afternoon slot. As well as one Friday evening game (8.30), there's a game on Saturday evening (6.30), and 2 on Sunday (3.30 and 5.30). Good news for German couch potatoes, methinks). In summer 2007 – after Bayern had had a disastrous season, failing to qualify for the Champions League – they splashed out on Frank Ribery and Luca Toni, the biggest name signings seen for many a year. Is it symbolic that both Ribery and Toni were expected to leave Bayern before the transfer window closed? Even though they stayed, I wouldn’t be surprised if one or the other leaves at Christmas.

With Diego leaving for Juventus, the Bundesliga lost arguably its most creative player – and the most interesting new names arriving in Germany pre-season were probably Pavel Pogrebnyak (to Stuttgart – but only after the 2006/7 Champions failed to reach agreement with Klaas-Jan Huntelaar over his wage demands) and Anatoly Tymoschchuk (to Bayern Munich) – names unlikely to boost season-ticket sales. Of course the only exception was the late signature of Arjen Robben to Bayern Munich – who got 2 goals on his debut a couple of days later. Apart from Robben, the biggest transfers in Germany this summer were “domestic”. Lucas Podolski left Bayern Munich to return to his beloved 1 FC Köln, and Bayern forked out some €30 million on Mario Gomez from Stuttgart and took Ivica Olic on a free transfer from Hamburg. While Gomez has attracted headlines from the foreign press about his dire performances for Germany - see his remarkable miss against Austria in EURO2008 (and an identical one in an earlier friendly) - he has probably been the best striker in the Bundesliga for 3 seasons now, shooting Stuttgart to the title 2 years ago. The concept of buying the best players from rival teams in the same league - in part, to weaken them - is a tactic used by rich clubs across the world. In this case, it will also strengthen Bayern as Gomez is now ahead of Klose and Toni in the pecking order. (For the record, Toni made his debut last week in the German 3rd Division playing for Bayern Reserves!) Olic can play a bit, too.

No, the new season is not startling for the close-season transfers – but for the managerial carousel. Only 8 of last season’s 18 teams went into the first game of the season with the same Manager as in May! And one of them (Dieter Hecking at Hannover 96) was sacked after 3 games! The most amazing one for me was Mainz 05, which got promoted last season having finished second in the 2. Bundesliga. They got knocked out of the Cup in the 1st Round, and then sacked their Manager 2 days before the 1st League game of the season! Can’t help feeling that a few more may follow before May 2010. Curiously, both Hannover and Mainz have appointed untried managers from within the club, e.g. the second team coach - presumably because they have had to pay off the ex-Manager, and a cheap coach is particularly attractive.

So who are all these teams who might win the league? Below is a brief word about all of the clubs, more or less in my subjective order of expectation. Before that, I would just like to pick out a couple of players who might shine this season – and at next summer’s World Cup. The most obvious guy is Werder Bremen’s Mesut Özil, who is probably good enough to step into Diego’s shoes. I would argue that he’s probably the most creative player Germany has had since Mehmet Scholl, i.e. in the last 10-15 years. He scored the goal that won the Cup last May, and seemingly won the European Under-21 Final against England by himself (aided by woeful defending, I seem to recall). Quantum of Sport’s own worldinmotion thought he was quite useful in the recent Germany-South Africa game. We’ll see how he manages to combine with his new teammate Marco Marin, signed from Mönchengladbach – an exciting dribbler, who has broken into the national team recently. The other names I wanted to mention are 2 keepers – both baby-faced under 25-year-olds, who have come through in the past couple of years: René Adler of Bayer Leverkusen and Manuel Neuer of Schalke. Bayern has already tried to sign Neuer.

Bundesliga 08/09 review: a remarkable season

Pre-season training is in full swing in Germany with the new Bundesliga season starting on August 7. But memories are still fresh of last season, which was one of the most exciting in Bundesliga history. See how it all unfolded in our special Bundesliga 2008/09 review, new on this site. (There are links to a couple of crazy goals in there too, by the way).