“If you’ve been on the internet at all in the last couple of days, you will probably have seen the clip of Eric Dier conducting a post-match interview with German TV, shortly after making his Bayern Munich debut against Union Berlin on Wednesday. The interview is in English, but the reason it became notable is Dier’s accent, which has an unmistakable German inflection. …”
The Athletic (Video)

“There was plenty of interest over the summer in how much momentum Xabi Alonso‘s Bayer Leverkusen could take from their great end to the previous campaign. A 14-match unbeaten run in the spring had seen them into the UEFA Europa League semi-finals and carried them up to sixth in the Bundesliga. Few could have possibly foreseen that everything would click into place so seamlessly for Die Werkself to rise to the top of the table and stay there with the swagger of real league leaders – putting together another astonishing unbeaten run stretching to 25 matches in all competitions (and counting) this autumn. …”
Bundesliga (Video)

“It is often trite to describe a particular goal as the turning point of a season. Especially with late goals, we have the tendency to let the emotion describe them, as if they are more important than they actually might be. Divorcing events from emotion has never been a speciality of Union Berlin, however. This is a club and a fanbase that feels everything. The club whose supporters literally gave their own blood to raise funds to fill empty coffers, who rebuilt a crumbling stadium with their own hands – and who, on the back of a horrendous run of 12 successive defeats which turned what should have been a dream season into an unfolding nightmare, chanted not for their head coach to be sacked, but emptied their lungs with the gospel that he was still a FußballGott to them. …”
Guardian

“How to turn a football team around 180 degrees, parts one and two. Even after Bayer Leverkusen made the 4,000km journey back from Thursday night Europa League duty in Baku, and even after Union Berlin stopped their losing streak by picking up a point in Diego Maradona’s back garden, this could not have run more faithfully to current script. At this time last year, Leverkusen and Union were polar opposites. Or almost. To be more precise at this exact point 12 months ago, the former were in 13th and the latter sitting up in second. The weeks immediately preceding that, even, had been the first evidence of the Xabi Alonso effect. …”
Guardian

“… The map page shows a location-map for the 18 clubs in the 2023-24 Bundesliga, with recently-promoted and -relegated teams noted. (Promoted in 2023: Darmstadt, Heidenheim; relegated in 2023: Schalke, Hertha [Berlin].) The map also shows the 16 Federal States of Germany, and the 14 largest cities in Germany, with 2021 population estimates listed at the the top of the map. …”
billsportsmaps
2023-24 Bundesliga

“… Once he arrived in Austria, Brenden thrived in the youth development focused environment in Salzburg, first under Jesse Marsch and then in tandem with Marsch’s successor as head coach, the highly rated Matthias Jaissle. The Medford Messi (a reference to the New Jersey town 40 minutes west of Philly where the brothers grew up, it was a nickname used more and more after his winning goal in a friendly against Barcelona in summer 2021) was a runaway train. …”
Guardian

“In East Berlin on Sunday, the Stadion Alte Forsterei hosted one of the Bundesliga’s most complicated fixtures. Union Berlin against RB Leipzig ended in a 3-0 win for the visitors. In itself, that was remarkable. It was Union’s first defeat in 24 matches at home and the culmination of a game full of wonderful goals, bad fouls and high drama. All of which was secondary to the main issue. …”
The Athletic (Video)

“If you wanted some kind of positive take, it was probably this: by treating Saturday’s 1-1 draw with Bochum and a fourth point from two matches like a minor catastrophe, Borussia Dortmund proved that they are making up some ground on Bayern Munich, in terms of attitude and aspiration at least. BVB’s actual football, however, was once again so lacking in structure that talk of a meaningful title challenge feels ridiculous right now. …”
The Athletic

“We tasked the Opta supercomputer with simulating the 2023-24 Bundesliga season 10,000 times to see how it believed the campaign may pan out. Across those results, 11 of the 18 Bundesliga teams won the league title at least once – but it won’t surprise anyone to hear that record champions Bayern Munich won it in over half of those simulations. Mainz and Stuttgart fans can dream. Yes, you both won the Bundesliga once across our 10,000 pre-season simulations. …”
The Analyst

“Bayern Munich and Qatar Airways have ended their partnership by mutual agreement. The Bundesliga club and airline have been partners for five years but will part ways at the end of the month when the current contract expires. The company are a ‘platinum partner’ of the club with the logo also appearing on the sleeve of the playing shirt. …”
The Athletic (Video)

“On Thursday night, the Bundesliga’s relegation play-off began. It likely ended, too. Contested between the team finishing 16th in the first division and third in the second, it is a two-legged tie packed into four days of the early summer. This season, it has brought together the 2 Bundesliga’s Hamburger SV, from Germany’s north, and the Bundesliga’s Stuttgart, from its south west. And, as has become semi-tradition, the side from the higher division looks almost certain to retain their place. Stuttgart scored their first goal within a minute of the game beginning. By full time, they had missed a penalty, spurned a whole buffet of good chances, and yet still comfortably won 3-0. …”
The Athletic (Video)

“It’s happening, isn’t it? As Borussia Dortmund and their supporters were celebrating the recapture of first spot at WWK Arena on Sunday, Edin Terzic knew that eternity was within their grasp. … We’ll hear plenty of warnings from BVB officials in the next few days to keep focus, that it’s not over yet and so forth, but in the aftermath of an utterly convincing 3-0 win away to bogey team FC Augsburg — whom they hadn’t beaten in Bavaria in three years — it felt very much as if the party had already started. …”
The Athletic

“… Schalke had nine points on the board after 17 matches, but have claimed 22 from a possible 48 in the second half of the season. Although hammered 6-0 at Bayern Munich on Matchday 32, previous wins over the likes of Hertha, Stuttgart and Werder Bremen have given them every chance of securing a second successive season of Bundesliga football. A 2-2 draw against Eintracht Frankfurt during Matchday 33 means they could still need a point against RB Leipzig on the final day of the season to avoid automatic relegation. …”
Bundesliga (Video)

“They can’t quite see nor taste it yet. But the unlikely sounds of big-time football could already be heard at Alte Forsterei on Saturday. Union Berlin supporters were heartily chanting ‘So ne Scheisse, so ne Scheisse, Champions League’ to the tune of Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’ during the 4-2 win over SC Freiburg. They like their witticisms a little rough in Kopenick, just like their football. …”
The Athletic

“It was always going to end at some point. They just didn’t want it to be here. Leverkusen’s phenomenal unbeaten run was stopped at 14 games, at the start of the week that will contain their Europa League semi-final first-leg date with destiny against Roma. …”
Guardian

“The club that sells the most football shirts in the world may surprise you. Despite clubs like Manchester United, Real Madrid and Barcelona having established fans across the globe and a history of mega-stars in their ranks – it isn’t them. Bayern Munich come in at number 1 in the shirt selling rankings, with a whopping 3.4 million shirts sold in 2021. But how does a club in the Bundesliga attract so much popularity? Seb Stafford-Bloor writes as Craig Silcock illustrates just why the Bavarian club have became so popular in recent years. ”
YouTube

“On Friday night, our train pulls into Wolfsburg. Four chimneys stretch into the dusk from the Volkswagen plant, a hulk of concrete, steel and brick sitting adjacent to the station and spreading as far as the eye can see. This is the heart of the city and yet, late at night, it’s eerily quiet. When Wolfsburg was created in 1938, it was conceived as a community to serve the mass production of an affordable family vehicle, what would become the Volkswagen Beetle, and the auto manufacturer still defines the city. …”
The Athletic

“The 100th Revierderby ended in a draw, but just like the famous 4-4 in 2017 (Schalke came back from 4-0 down) and the 3-3 in 2008 (Dortmund came back from 3-0 down in Jurgen Klopp’s first derby at Signal Iduna Park), Saturday’s meeting produced one clear winner. Veltins-Arena was an explosion of noise and gratitude at the final whistle: Schalke had fought back twice to keep their unbeaten run of seven league games going. And with each week, the prospect of staying up, a possibility that appeared frankly ludicrous at the start of the winter break, is becoming stronger. …”
The Athletic
Guardian: Leipzig present a tough Champions League proposition to Guardiola

Halvorsen, centre, was a star for Hamburg before returning to his native Norway
“Hamburg train station, September 1933 – the scene for a farewell between two long-time team-mates who achieved so much together. Asbjorn Halvorsen was heading home to Norway. A midfielder with Hamburg, he had been a key part of their attack and one of German football’s first foreign stars. The other man – Otto Fritz ‘Tull’ Harder – had been the beneficiary of Halvorsen’s creativity. A clinical finisher with the strength of a removal man, Harder’s goals had powered Hamburg to German titles in 1923 and 1928. …”
BBC

“They say that history is written by the winners, but it never felt, before this season, as if Borussia Dortmund would be in the position to pick up their pen. Now, it might be different. It felt that way when Nico Schlotterbeck, the crown prince of defensive drama in these parts, saw Timo Werner’s late shot speed past Alexander Meyer, Dortmund’s stand-in goalkeeper, and reacted to clear off the line with a mixture of chest and shoulder, all but sealing the win. Schlotterbeck clenched his fists, celebrating it like a goal. …”
Guardian

“Borussia Mönchengladbach’s social media team couldn’t resist it. As the final whistle blew on their result of the season, probably, of most seasons, there was a post to acknowledge the victory over Bayern Munich. Then, straight away, there was a still of Bill Murray’s misanthropic TV reporter Phil Connors, waiting for Punxsutawney Phil to pop his furry head out of the hatch, with no further comment. This was their, and the champions’, Groundhog Day. Because even against Bayern, Die Fohlen have been here before. …”
Guardian