Has Bayern Munich destroyed the Bundesliga?

Every follower of football knows about Bayern Munich, the juggernauts of German football. It is a club with a long and proud history, and has produced players like Franz Beckenbauer, der Kaiser himself. It has won a record 24 national titles and 17 national cups, and five Champions League titles as well.

The recent squad is one of the best ever fielded by the club; it features a large number of the players from the World Cup winning squad of Germany, players like Manuel Neuer, Philip Lahm, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Mario Gotze and Thomas Mueller. Foriegn stars like Dutch dynamo Arjen Robben and France winger Franck Ribery also feature in a dream lineup.

The success enjoyed by the club of late is proportional to the quality of the squad, they won the treble in the 2012-13 season, turning in a series of dominant performances to claim the crown of Europe. The last season as well, they won the Bundesliga by a record margin of points under new coach Pep Guardiola.

But what is perhaps not so clear to observers is that Bayern’s utter dominance of the German Bundesliga may actually be destroying the entire league structure. If we examine any other country, the top leagues always have multiple clubs competing for the trophy. The English League is highly competitive, Spain has at least two teams with the potential to win, it is the same in Italy, and in France the rise of PSG and Monaco under foreign ownership has given competition to established clubs like LOSC Lille and Olympique Marsielle.

But in Germany, it always has been Bayern Munich. Particularly in the recent era, they have had a stranglehold on German club football, with no other team even close to dethroning them. A Borussia Dortmund team inspired by Jurgen Klopp rose to the challenge, but the financial might of Munich has stopped that threat, and the Dortmund team has lost several key players over the past couple of years, Mario Gotze and Robert Lewandowski in particular, both of whom have moved to Bayern.

While it may seem like good business to buy the stars of your rivals to weaken them, in a German league that already lacks serious competition for the top spot, this makes it very tough for other teams to get any sort of recognition on the global stage. This directly influences their ability to purchase quality players. This is particularly true for Dortmund. No truly world class players are willing to sign for the club, due to the slim chances of them being able to win any silverware. Therefore, they have resorted to creating stars from their own youth academy. And when clubs like Bayern, who can pay much more, poach those stars, it further destroys the credibility of Dortmund as a serious club who want to win.

And this is not just restricted to Dortmund. The purchase of players like Neuer and Toni Kroos from smaller clubs in recent years shows Bayern’s complete and utter dominance of the German transfer market. They can buy any player they want because they can guarantee silverware, something no other club in Germany can do. And while this may be beneficial to Bayern Munich themselves, it hurts the rest of the league, as those other teams are unable to attract quality foreign talent, or even hold on to their own players.

So perhaps it would be better for German football as a whole if Bayern were to curb their spending, at least in the domestic market, so that other clubs are able to compete as well and the quality of the German league as a whole improves. We already know they have the best national team in the world, all that remains is to build a competitive league and German football may soon become the premier league competition in the world.