Bayern’s 2–5 Defeat to Bremen in Historical Perspective

Hav­ing had the time to digest Bayern’s 2–5 maul­ing by Bre­men (no need to rehash things here, if you need a refresher check out the excel­lent post at Deutsche Welle’s Ball­spiel or the video high­lights at 101 Great Goals), I wanted to know exactly how bad it was for the Bavar­i­ans. No mat­ter what your feel­ings regard­ing the team, it’s dif­fi­cult to argue with the dis­mal per­for­mances by the entire team from Rens­ing for­ward. But sim­ply acknowl­edg­ing this poor dis­play as such and mov­ing on wasn’t enough. As a (future) his­to­rian, I glee­fully dove into the archives of pre­vi­ous sea­sons look­ing for some­thing, any­thing, com­pa­ra­ble in shame to what hap­pened in Munich. I didn’t have to look too hard. Over the past decade Bre­men have ham­mered a num­ber of teams by at least four goals away from home, so Bayern’s 3 goal deficit shouldn’t look too bad. In chrono­log­i­cal order:

In 1999/2000 Wolfs­burg went down 2–7
In 2001/2002 Ham­burg were shutout 0–4
In 2003/2004 Han­nover scored only a sin­gle con­so­la­tion goal in their 1–5 defeat
In 2006/2007 Both Frank­furt (2–6) and Bochum (0–6) con­ceded six to Bremen

See, Jür­gen, it could be worse. Wait, what’s that? Bay­ern had lost only 9 times at home to domes­tic oppo­si­tion over the last 10 years? And then not by more than two goals in any of those defeats? Bre­men have now defeated Bay­ern 4 times (with 3 draws) in Munich since the 1998/1999 sea­son. As you might imag­ine, that’s best record against the Reds in the league.

So, how far back must one go to dis­cover a dis­play of com­pa­ra­ble inep­ti­tude by Bay­ern at home? Set the radio on your time machine to the Bee Gees and Donna Sum­mer we’re off to the 70s. Back to the 1978/1979 sea­son where, in antic­i­pa­tion of Disco Demo­li­tion Night later that sum­mer, Bay­ern were, well, them­selves demol­ished  4–0 on an inglo­ri­ous March after­noon at the Olympias­ta­dion. It would not be unrea­son­able to assume this drub­bing came at the hands of Ham­burg, the even­tual cham­pi­ons, and home to Euro­pean Foot­baller of the Year Kevin Kee­gan. Not quite. Actu­ally it was Arminia Biele­feld (!), rel­e­gated at season’s end, who came away with three points and four goals that day.

So Jür­gen, I warned you ear­lier this sum­mer that the Bay­ern board doesn’t look kindly upon fail­ure. So while it may still be early in the sea­son, a his­toric loss like this doesn’t bode well for the rest of the cam­paign. You’ve got the per­son­nel in the squad to seri­ously chal­lenge for the title. Either revamp your “tac­tics” or use part of your large pay­check to out­source the coach­ing aspect of your job. Oth­er­wise results like this will no longer be con­sid­ered anom­alous, but rou­tine. And that’s bad for your man­age­r­ial health.

Tagged as: Bielefeld, Bremen, FC Bayern München, Frankfurt, Hamburger SV, Hannover 96, Jürgen Klinsmann, Kevin Keegan, Michael Rensing, VfL Bochum, VfL Wolfsburg