Bayer Leverkusen today secured the 2024 Bundesliga title with a 5-0 win over Werder Bremen and a 29-match record of 25 wins, four draws and no defeats. Unbeaten in all competitions for 38 matches, a record number of points are within their reach over the last five matches.
The Treble is also underway: a place in the German Cup final awaits in May and they are one match away from the Europa League semi-finals. On Thursday they blew away West Ham in the first leg of the quarter-final.
Knocked off their perch is Bayern Munich – the kings of the German game, with 11 consecutive titles and a wage bill three times that of Leverkusen. Xabi Alonso, Leverkusen’s manager of just 18 months, is the man of the moment. In October 2022, the club was 17th in the Bundesliga with 18 teams. How did they become champions for the first time in their history, how did they get here so quickly?
The gamble on Alonso
One of the best players of the best generation of Spanish midfielders, Alonso has coached a playing style with high passing volume, high ball possession and fast counter-pressing reminiscent of the Barcelona of the late 2000s. His transformation from a promising, well-built team to one of Europe’s best teams has been one of the biggest managerial upgrades in years. Yet he still felt like a risk for Leverkusen a year and a half ago, with five points from eight games.
Alonso enjoyed some success with his hometown club Real Sociedad’s B team, gaining promotion to the second tier in 2021, followed by relegation the following season. Meanwhile, Leverkusen’s hierarchy wanted to implement change. By October 2022, the momentum that had brought Champions League qualification the previous season had disappeared. The club wanted to play a match with a lot of ball possession. Alonso was a promising prospect and had resigned from Sociedad B in the summer. He had status in the game and the club liked the idea of a young manager who was so technically adept that he could demonstrate to the players how to do it on the training pitch . The big question: was he ready for a relegation battle in the Bundesliga?
The close-knit manager
The club is run by a small circle of executives: sporting director Simon Rolfes; head of recruitment Kim Falkenberg; CEO Fernando Carro, a Spanish citizen; and under the supervision of chairman Werner Wenning. The latter is an important figure in German industry and former CEO of Bayer AG, the pharmaceutical giant from which the club emerged as a factory team 120 years ago.
Rolfes was a German international who had a decade as a central defender for Leverkusen, around the time Alonso was at the height of his powers as a player. Falkenberg was a successful graduate of the Leverkusen academy and also played as a centre-back, albeit in Germany’s second tier, before retiring in his late 20s to rejoin Leverkusen in recruitment. He eventually rose to the top of that department when Tim Steidten left to become West Ham’s technical director last summer. Rolfes appointed Falkenberg as his replacement. It was Rolfes’ last call to appoint Alonso in October last year.
Between Alonso, Rolfes and Falkenberg, they have built an astonishing side of overachievers on a wage bill roughly a third the value of Bayern’s.
Leverkusen’s status as a GmbH – a limited company – means that Leverkusen’s finances are harder to penetrate than those of its member-owned clubs. Depending on European qualification, revenues are expected to be around €270 million, although Leverkusen does not feature in Deloitte’s audit of club revenues. Leverkusen’s wage bill is considered the fourth highest in the Bundesliga, around €143 million, behind the big two in Germany and just below that of RB Leipzig. The gap with Bayern is the most striking.
By comparison, Bayern is ranked sixth in the world in terms of annual revenue this year by Deloitte, with €744 million. As for Bayern’s wage bill, it is believed to be around €348 million. Borussia Dortmund is 12th with an annual turnover of 420 million euros and a wage bill of 231 million euros.
Bayer AG’s support for the club that bears his name is estimated at up to 25 million euros per year, although this may decrease depending on requirements. Carro is one of the few German football administrators who is against the 50+1 convention. “We don’t live in an isolated world,” he recently told the FT, “imposing something like this through regulation is no longer valid.”
Rolfes and Falkenberg run all football operations, while Carro oversees the business. When it works well it means decisions can be made quickly in a small collaborative group – and as of October 2022 it has worked very well.
A change in transfer tactics
Leverkusen have always been a selling club, and that did not change after Alonso led the team to the semi-finals of the Europa League last season, in an all-round revival that saw them finish sixth in the Bundesliga, 21 points behind champions Bayern. Moussa Diaby was sold to Aston Villa for £52 million, just as Bernd Leno, Kai Havertz and Leon Bailey had all been profitable sales in the Premier League before him. Leverkusen had always invested wisely in young players who were likely to develop into big sellers. This summer, Rolfes and Falkenberg adjusted the model.
Experience was assessed as what the team needed. From Arsenal came Swiss midfielder Granit This also applies to Jonas Hofmann, for whom Leverkusen paid a fee of €10 million at the age of 31. Spanish full-back Alex Grimaldo, 28, was a free agent earning high wages by Leverkusen standards. They have all been fundamental to the success of the season.
Young players from emerging leagues
Rolfes and Falkenberg run large scouting departments with specializations in certain markets. Their South American scout Dieter Schreiber previously managed Adidas’ portfolio of elite endorsers in that region. Falkenberg recruited Brighton and Hove Albion academy scouting manager Matthew Green to oversee senior recruitment in emerging markets such as Sweden, Belgium and the Football League Championship. The club convinced Southampton’s Nathan Tella, a Stevenage boy who has chosen to play for Nigeria due to family heritage, to turn down a Premier League season with Burnley. He was a key loan signing there in the club’s promotion season, but decided to join Leverkusen instead.
At the age of 24, Tella was one of those whose potential was considered by many clubs. Leverkusen could sell him the possibility of Europa League and now Champions League football as a springboard for his career. The same was the case for Victor Boniface, another major investment of €20 million from Bodø/Glimt in Norway. After the sale of Diaby, Leverkusen’s net expenditure was approximately €20 million. Bayern spent €110 million on Harry Kane alone. Bayern also loaned Croatian defender Josip Stanisic to Leverkusen, with an agreement that he could even play against his parent club. Stanisic scored Leverkusen’s first goal in their 3-0 win over Bayern in February.
The challenge now is to keep the staff together
The club had never won a major trophy before. They were best known across Europe for the infamous ‘Neverkusen’ season of 2001-2002, when the team finished second in the Bundesliga, losing the Champions League final and the DFB-Pokal final. Alonso will stay and the club will play in the lucrative new Champions League next season with eight matches in the group stage. The pressure is on for Bayer to build on this season’s success. Will they still have to sell?
The team’s two stars are Germany international Florian Wirtz, 20, the team’s highest earner on around €145,000 per week, and Dutch winger Jeremy Frimpong, 23, formerly of Celtic. Another bold move was Wirtz, who he signed from local rivals FC Cologne as a teenager. Frimpong, a Manchester City academy graduate who grew up in England, is the most likely candidate with a value of as much as €50 million.
Rolfes and Falkenberg will be important in the Premier League and beyond. Still just 36, Falkenberg has been part of the club’s recruitment department since 2017, even though his playing career in the lower league was in its final stages. He was appointed chief scout in 2019 and worked under Rolfes, who had himself been taught by the previous sporting director, the mustached West German legend of the 1980s, Rudi Voller.
Steidten stood on the sidelines of the Bayer Arena at the final whistle to shake Alonso’s hand after the home side’s dominance finally broke West Ham. An association with Europe’s golden team of 2023-2024 is valuable and those at the heart of this incredible success story – manager, players, executives – are likely to be sought after. Performing better than budget is one thing, winning a surprising title is something completely different. But this team from Leverkusen could now reach 93 points and end the season undefeated. Even the mighty Bayern have never done that.