Football – Bayer Leverkusen’s football work of art with an expiry date

There was a bit of envy when Nuri Şahin spoke about Bayer 04 Leverkusen, BVB’s first competitive opponent in the new year. The 36-year-old Borussia Dortmund coach described the Werkself at the press conference before the duel this Friday evening as a “team that is exceptionally good, that has an exceptional mentality” and said: “They have achieved where we want and will get to .” It is rather unlikely that the latter will succeed, because the Master of the Rhine created a constellation of the century that cannot be copied.

The latest example is national player Jonathan Tah, a pillar of the successful Bayer structure. The Leverkusen defense chief has announced that he will change clubs in the summer, and speculation has been rife for months. »As of now, nothing has been decided. I am fully focused on being successful with Leverkusen. I will make my decision soon – and when I have done that, I will communicate it,” was the 28-year-old’s latest comment on this week’s rumors about transfer options to FC Barcelona or Inter Milan.

While there was a lot of unrest in the dressing room in Dortmund around the departures of Erling Haaland, Jude Bellingham and Mats Hummels and some people played as if their minds were somewhere else for a long time, Tah is a role model for the rest of the team. Probably the best central defender of the Bundesliga season so far embodies the enormous hunger that has been driving this team for some time now. After some small negligence in the first third of the season led to points being lost, the team had “found that bite again, that energy, that will to win,” explained sports director Simon Rolfes before the Bundesliga restarted after the short winter break.

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Nevertheless, the Leverkusen sports director now has to plan for the end of a football work of art, the significance of which may only become apparent in its entirety in a few years. Because no matter how exciting and successful the coming half-year turns out, the team that overcame the “Vizekusen” trauma as eternal runner-up by winning the double, and that has now been playing some of the best football in the world for more than a year, will only continue to exist for a few more months.

With Tah’s departure, the trio of irreplaceables, which also includes Florian Wirtz and Granit Xhaka, is broken up. It is also uncertain whether Wirtz will stay; if the Rhinelanders do not manage to extend the contract of their most valuable player, he will be sold. Club boss Fernando Carro has already announced this. It is also unclear whether coach Xabi Alonso will once again resist the call of the giants from England, Spain or southern Germany. In this respect, the coming months offer something like a last chance for this extraordinary team to achieve further greatness.

In Leverkusen everyone is aware of this extraordinary constellation of a perfectly harmonized team, led by perhaps the greatest coaching talent Alonso and the upcoming world star Wirtz. The 21-year-old looks even more mature this season than last year. Midfield boss Xhaka also wants more. Suddenly even Patrik Schick is in top form; the striker has scored nine goals in his last five Bundesliga games.

Thanks to the Czech, the gap in the table to FC Bayern shrank from nine to four points in the weeks before Christmas. And on February 15th, the record champions still have to play an away game in Leverkusen. The competition for the championship is open again. Maybe even a coup in the Champions League is possible. Xhaka was correspondingly satisfied with his team’s annual results: “The last three, three and a half months were very strong for us. We showed mentality again and made a lot of runs, even without the ball.”

Nobody at the Werkself wants to talk too much. “We would do well to simply do our tasks, just as we did at the end of the year, game by game,” explained national player Robert Andrich two days before the duel between second-placed Leverkusen in the Westfalenstadion, to then indicate what many really think in the club: “Let’s see whether we are the second force – or the first.”