Bayern Munich’s dominance reinforces the myth of competition in football

Simple as that, it’s over. For two months or so, there was only a glimmer of hope for Bundesliga clubs. They hadn’t felt that for a long time. They didn’t want to admit the feeling now, not in public: it was fragile, guilty, probably desperate, but still hopeful.

Robert Lewandowski is gone. Serge Gnabry, for some time, looked like he might follow. Thomas Müller and Manuel Neuer were a year older. For the first time in a decade, Bayern Munich didn’t look weak – Bayern Munich are never weak – but just a little diminished, just a little more human.

At Borussia Dortmund, at Bayer Leverkusen, at RB Leipzig, the idea would have formed, spontaneous and silent. What if Dortmund’s reinforcements worked? What if Florian Wirtz blossomed? What if Christopher Nkunku was just getting started? What if this was one of those years, the intermediaries, the injunctions, when Bayern declines and another rises?

Then the cold reality intruded. Bayern’s first game of the season was at Eintracht Frankfurt’s stadium: an intimidating, packed pitch, rooting for a team that had won the Europa League just a few months earlier. It wasn’t a smooth start. Not for the first five minutes, at least.

Then Joshua Kimmich scored. Five minutes later, Benjamin Pavard did too. Subsequently, Jamal Musiala and Gnabry went to Sadio Mané, in his debut. The Bundesliga season was exactly 43 minutes long, and all hope was extinguished and all the “ifs” were answered. The score was 5-0 and the day would end at 6-1. So for another year, it was over.

Hope is a little tougher than that, of course. Nobody, not even Bayern Munich, wins a championship in August. His victory over Eintracht was just one game. Perhaps in the next few months Julian Nagelsmann’s tactics backfire. Perhaps the Bayern team will enter into a major rebellion. Perhaps it is afflicted with an epidemic of injuries. Perhaps the World Cup will split the season into two halves, both disturbed by chance.

Still, the impression left by that first day’s rout was indelible. Lewandowski’s departure and the lingering sense of generational change it provoked at Bayern did nothing to change the power dynamics in the Bundesliga. The fate of their championship seems predetermined, if not from the moment the season started, certainly from the 43rd minute.

This, of course, came to be seen as the fatal mistake of German football. Bayern have more fans, more commercial influence and more cash prizes in the Champions League, so they have a supremacy that is now approaching the absolute. Won all Alemão titles in the last ten years. Sometimes the difference to the closest candidate is 25 points. There is no drama. There are no doubts. It doesn’t feel right, at the top of the table, to describe the Bundesliga as a competition.

Germany, at least, is not alone. In France, Paris Saint-Germain started their season by scoring three goals in 38 minutes against Clermont and ended up winning 5-0. PSG have won eight of the last ten titles available in France. Its budget, bloated by Qatari beneficence, bears no resemblance to that of any of its rivals. The air in Ligue 1 is also charged with inevitability.

In theory, of course, this not only reflects poorly on both leagues, it also limits their appeal and ambition. Sports, we are led to believe, require two things to keep old fans and attract new ones, to fill stadiums, to get the attention of drifting and distracted television audiences.

They are related (and often confusing) but distinct. One is what is often called competitive equilibrium: the idea that multiple participants in a tournament can ultimately win it. The other is known, academically, as the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis: the belief that an individual game within any competition is only attractive if fans feel – or at least can be mistaken – that both sides have a chance.

The best measure of how important these concepts are held by the leagues themselves is in the Premier League’s deeply arrogant, yet undeniably successful, marketing strategy.

In the Premier League, the first division’s sense of identity is inextricably linked to the idea that not only can any team beat any other team at any time, but that it alone has a multitude of challengers for the final crown.

Germany and France, after all, have only one. Spain has three: Real Madrid, Atlético Madrid and any part of Barcelona that hasn’t been sold to sign Marcos Alonso. Italy’s candidates might be as high as four these days, but that’s only because Juventus kindly decided to spend three years imploding.

England, however, have at least six, half a dozen teams entering the season with a chance of winning the championship. The reality, of course, is substantially more complex: not just because some of the six are more equal than others, but also because having a comparatively broad sample of candidates means a less predictable season, but more predictable games.

Truth, in this case, matters less than belief. It is widely accepted that the Premier League’s success is due to the fact that it is less processional than all rival competitions. It follows, then, that the prospect of yet another season in which Bayern Munich and PSG walk towards their domestic crowns is a negative mark against the leagues that house them.

This, to most fans, seems right. Seems fair. It is obviously a disadvantage to know, almost from the start, which team will emerge victorious. It’s like going to the movies knowing that one lover lets the other drown even though there’s plenty of room on the boat, or actually the guy is a ghost, there’s not much point in staying until the end. There must be a competitive balance. There must be uncertainty of the result. After all, that’s why we watched.

Except it really isn’t. A paper published in 2020 by researchers at the University of Liverpool — and based on a series of academic research into sports fans’ motivations — found that there was no correlation between how uncertain the outcome of any given game was and how many people watched it. The connection, they wrote, was “decidedly insignificant.”

Turns out, that’s not why most people watch sporting events, whether we like to admit it or not. According to the researchers, there was a connection between the audience and the quality of the athletes on display. Even more important, though, was the name of the teams involved. Brand power, they wrote, tended to “overpower any contribution to audience size.”

However, there is one other conclusion in this 2020 report that is worth noting. “A match with the highest importance in the championship observed in our dataset is expected to attract an aggregate audience 96% larger than one with no implications for prizes to be awarded at the end of the season”, even if the teams involved were the themselves, the researchers wrote.

In other words, what fans really want – more than competitive balance, more than the uncertainty of the outcome, more than famous faces and powerful names – is competition. They want, we want, as much competition as possible: games where everything seems to be under threat. That’s what sells championships. That’s what attracts fans.

Ultimately, neither Germany nor France can offer that. It’s what’s becoming rarer each season in the rest of Europe’s major leagues and some of the smaller ones as well, due to the skewed effects of Champions League revenue across the continent.

But that’s what we want more than anything. Watching Bayern and PSG go by trampling everything and everyone offers short-term success, the fleeting satisfaction of admiration, but at the cost of the bigger prize. There will probably be no Bundesliga decision this season. There will be no final confrontation. How can there be, when everything seemed to be resolved in 43 minutes?