The Franz Beckenbauer Supercup has a modicum more intensity than most of its European equivalents. There are many reasons for this. The Bundesliga’s traditional season curtain-raiser pitting league champions against cup winners is not played on neutral territory, giving it the feeling of a domestic game with proper stakes.
German fans would also never accept it taking place on foreign soil, as the Borussia Dortmund managing director, Carsten Cramer, reiterated in clear terms over the course of the weekend. It feels like a match, rather than a showpiece. It had one other factor to ratchet up the adrenaline this year.
It was the sense the two teams most expect to be the season’s best, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, were the participants, with last term’s second-placed side hosting the champions. There was enough in the game to suggest the latter may be able inconvenience the former, as Bayern held on to win the season’s first trophy after BVB followed a thoroughly dominant first half from the visitors with a vastly improved second period. But enough to create genuine jeopardy?
That was harder to buy into. We all know what it takes for someone else to win the title in Germany: an exceptional team, like Jürgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund or the Xabi Alonso-era Bayer Leverkusen, allied with a below-par Bayern . That second clause is far from being fulfilled.
For every action there is a reaction and in the past 15 years when Bayern have been domestically beaten it was met with a fierce response. So if Dortmund provoked Bayern to hit unimaginable levels with the 2013 treble, the same snap out of a deep funk has happened under Vincent Kompany. For Klopp’s wins in 2011 and 2012, read 2023 – when Dortmund all but handed Bayern their title back on the final day – and 2024, when Alonso’s Leverkusen finally took it away from them again.
Once again, two years of fallibility was enough to make Bayern respond with force. The leadership that has taken the champions there is key. Just as few would have imagined in spring 2012 that Jupp Heynckes would lead Bayern to virtual invincibility, there was not a queue of people scrambling to decree Kompany as the man to inspire the Rekordmeister to heights not reached since peak Pep Guardiola, but here we are.
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