Bayern Munich's Uli HoeneAY And Bundesliga's "Natural Cycle"

Uli HoeneAY is known for trash-talking the opposition. The Bayern president’s pugnacious demeanor represents not just HoeneAY’ personal feelings, but also the historical role that Bayern has played within German football.

The buildup to Saturdayai??i??s Champions League final has produced the predictable exchange of hard talk and semi-provocations between the hardened rivals from Dortmund and Munich. One voice, however, has been conspicuously absent: that of Bayernai??i??s president Uli HoeneAY. HoeneAY, known for his outspoken demeanor and frequent trash-talking of opposing teams in the press, has been temporarily silenced by his fall from public grace after a recent tax evasion scandal. FCB haters everywhere have drawn predictable conclusions from the scandal, with one pro-Dortmund website giving the Dortmund-Bayern duel the epithet ai???Schwarzgelb gegen Schwarzgeld.ai???

UliAi??HoeneAY’ wars of words

For HoeneAY, the irony of the Champions League final matchup might be that even while Bayern has so impressively clawed its way back to the very top on the domestic front, the specter of the yellow nemesis has yet to be exorcised. After the 1-0 victory over Dortmund in the German Cup quarterfinal, HoeneAY declared ai??i?? not without reason ai??i?? that, ai???We have won back the position of supremacy in Germany.ai??? Yet of all teams, it is Dortmund that is now challenging Bayern for the European title. Back in September, with almost an entire Bundesliga season ahead, HoeneAY felt the need to comment that ai???Dortmund is a relatively regional phenomenonai??? ai??i?? a remark that has been reduced to ridicule by Dortmundai??i??s Champions League campaign, and immortalized accordingly in BVB fan T-shirts.

What is the ethos that leads HoeneAY to go on seemingly permanent offensive against a club that has never maintained the pretension of dethroning Bayern from its ai???position of supremacyai??? on a long-term basis? (To use a Premier League analogy, Dortmund in 2010-12 was just as on the rise as the Arsenal of 1998 and 2002, but without Wengerai??i??s rhetorical claptrap about ai???a shift in the balance of power.ai???) In his September comment, HoeneAY had also asserted that Dortmund ai???will never, ever be able to overtake [Bayernai??i??s] 30-year long traditionai??? ai??i?? a statement that sheds much light as to where the Bavarianai??i??s rhetoric is coming from.

The history of HoeneAYai??i?? many wars of words reads like a journey through the history of the Bundesliga. HoeneAY, who became Bayern manager in 1979 after ending his playing career, famously sparred with KAi??ln coach Christoph Daum in a 1989 talk show as Bayern and 1. FC KAi??ln fought bitterly for the title. Daum would later defect to KAi??lnai??i??s arch-rival Bayer Leverkusen, who subsequently became Bayernai??i??s next main challenger and came tantalizingly close to taking the title on multiple occasions. Daum the coach, meanwhile, long met his downfall on the German stage following a cocaine scandal ai??i?? his last Bundesliga appointment being an ill-fated attempt to save Eintracht Frankfurt from relegation in late 2010-11.

HoeneAY looked to have met his match in 2003-04, when he declared before a pivotal Bayern-Bremen encounter that even if Bayern were to lose the German title to the new upstart, it ought to show ai???who the best German team is.ai??? Bremen won the match 3-1 and secured the title on Bayernai??i??s home turf. The green-whites, with their charismatic leadership duo of Thomas Schaaf and Klaus Allofs, looked to be the side to give Bayern game for years to come; yet they, too, have fallen into decline after failing to repeat their 2003-04 triumph. In the past three seasons, Bremen has missed out on the European places, with Allofs defecting to Wolfsburg mid-season in 2012-13 in a controversial move. Schaaf bade his club an emotional farewell at the end of the season, with the misadventures of his last three seasons hanging heavily in the backdrop.

The “natural cycle” of German football

HoeneAY embodies the self-assuredness of a Bayern club that has seen all and overcome all: while challengers ai??i?? including the most flamboyant of HoeneAYai??i?? personal rivals ai??i?? have come and gone, HoeneAYai??i?? Bayern has been a mainstay at the very top of German football. From this standpoint, then, Dortmund is just the latest in a never-ending series of upstarts. Dortmund cannot overtake ai???30 years of traditionai??? any more than the others could, from Gladbach in HoeneAYai??i?? playing days to the Frankfurt, Dortmund, Stuttgart, and Leverkusen sides of the 1990s that could not sustain their successes. This is the ai???natural cycleai??? of German football; the ai???Spanish conditionsai??? ai??i?? the specter of which HoeneAY raised in his last major press statement before the tax scandal ai??i?? are understandably alien to Germany.

The extreme irony and treachery of the ai???Spanish conditionsai??? debate, of course, is that it was almost immediately followed by the announcement of Mario GAi??tzeai??i??s ai??i??37m transfer to Bayern. The only possible conclusion here is that HoeneAYai??i?? fear of ai???Spanish conditionsai??? and the idea of something similar to a Real-Barcelona duopoly had nothing to do with the lack of competition in the league, but with the prospect that Bayern might actually face a serious long-term challenge from Dortmund. (HoeneAYai??i?? insistence in an interview shortly before the GAi??tze transfer that Bayern has no interest in weakening the competition has been shown to be nothing short of a lie.) Dortmund, after all, has shown that it is not the most typical come-and-go Bayern challenger: it won the Bundesliga title in two seasons in a row ai??i?? the first non-Bayern side to do so since Dortmund in 1994-96 ai??i?? and set the Bundesliga record for points in a season in 2011-12, now broken by Bayern in 2012-13.

On the heels of the single greatest season by any team in Bundesliga history, in which the gulf in class between Bayern and the rest of the league already became evident, Bayernai??i??s signings of GAi??tze and (presumably) Lewandowski appear to be a move to restore the aforementioned ai???natural cycleai??? of German football. Yet what the GAi??tze and Lewandowski transfers underscore is that there is nothing ai???naturalai??? about the ebb and flow of Bayern challengers: Bayern has always ai??i?? and especially in the last decade and a half ai??i?? weakened its nearest competitors by buying off their best talent, from Stuttgartai??i??s Giovane Elber and Dortmund star coach Ottmar Hitzfeld to Leverkusenai??i??s Michael Ballack and ZAi?? Roberto and Bremenai??i??s Miroslav Klose. In a sense, the German model is a microcosm of European football at large: the financial dominance of a big club systematically distorts competition to the point that we will never know how the Bundesliga would look in the absence of an iron law that concentrates talent in one club. The story of almost every come-and-go Bayern challenger of the past 30 years has been one of ai???what could have beenai??i??had it not been for money.ai???

In a season in which FCB has shown some of Europeai??i??s finest football ai??i?? breaking record after record in the Bundesliga and claiming famous victories in the Champions League ai??i?? Bayern has also shown its hideousness, from HoeneAYai??i?? tax scandal to the shameless hypocrisy of the ai???Spanish conditionsai??? debate. It has also renounced all claim on the hearts of neutrals by virtue of its strategy of sabotaging its closest opposition at every opportunity. If youai??i??re worried that it would be unfair for Bayern to lose the Champions League final for a third straight time, just think: now that the Bavarians have bagged GAi??tze and most likely Lewandowski from their nearest rival this season, arenai??i??t they all but guaranteed to win next season?

_____

By guest author Seongcheol Kim.Ai??SeongcheolAi??is a bleeding-heart
BorussiaAi??Dortmund fan since 2004 and an avid Bundesliga watcher.

Bayern Munich’s Uli HoeneAY And The “Natural Cycle” Of German Football

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