For just a few seconds, Vincent Kompany let it all hang out. As the Südkurve chanted his name, the Bayern Munich coach stepped forward and started punching the air in a frenzy, bellowing in joy at everybody and nobody.

“You see in that moment how much work goes into winning a title,” he said a few minutes later in the quiet of the press conference room. “I think it’s important to keep that same feeling you have when you win your first one.”

This was, of course, by no means the first one. Bayern’s 4-2 victory over Stuttgart on Sunday saw them crowned German champions for the 35th time in their history, the 34th time in the Bundesliga era and the 13th time in the last 14 years. By now, these are barely title wins at all. They are just soul-crushing groundhog days in a hegemony so total that even Bayern’s own fans are bored of it.

And yet, this one did feel different. Usually, Bayern’s titles are met with anguish and soul-searching over the death of the German game. On this occasion, the consensus was different. On Sunday, Stuttgart coach Sebastian Hoeness hailed Bayern as “a great ambassador for German football”. Kicker proclaimed them as “champions of our hearts”. Even 11Freunde admitted that “you can’t even hate Bayern properly anymore”.

So what happened? Has the country just run out of hate? Or are Bayern now simply so powerful that submission is the only viable option? It has taken more than forty years, but German football has finally won the battle against itself. It loves Big Brother.

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Or perhaps it just loves Vincent Kompany. For however much they might hate Bayern, almost nobody in Germany can find a bad word to say about their coach. The man who two years ago arrived to baffled looks and barely stifled sniggers has now established himself as one of the most popular figures in German public life.

There are plenty of reasons to like Kompany. His team plays thoroughly entertaining football and scores lots of goals. He has spoken with eloquence and urgency on issues like racism and gender equality. He also seems to genuinely enjoy football. After beating Real Madrid last week, he compared it to beating Blackburn with Burnley. His celebration against Stuttgart was spontaneous and heartfelt, the polar opposite of the time Franck Ribery shouted the word “celebrate” into a camera on the request of a club social media manager.

Most crucially of all, Kompany is gracious in victory. On Sunday, he demanded “zero arrogance”, saying he wanted “to celebrate and give this title the respect it deserves”. For all his abundant self-belief, Kompany has none of the usual Bavarian haughtiness.

This, after all, is part of the problem with Bayern. It is not just that they win everything and buy everyone else’s best players. It is also that they are simply too Bavarian. Germany’s largest federal state, for all its myriad charms, is also the easiest one to hate. It is wealthy. It has a disproportionate influence on national politics via the CSU party. Above all, it cultivates an almost cartoonish parochialism which grates on the nerves of many other Germans. Right down to their name and their badge, Bayern are the footballing embodiment of all that. When opposing fans want to bait them, they sing about pulling their lederhosen down.

The club, for their part, have embraced all this. The more successful and unpopular they have become, the more they have hammed up their Bavarian identity. Their club motto “Mia san mia” literally means “we are who we are”, effectively a middle finger to the rest of the world written out in Bavarian dialect. Introduced as a marketing ploy in 2008, it fits neatly into the clichés of Bavarian arrogance. Here is a club claiming to be concerned only with itself, but doing so loudly in the middle of everyone else’s lunch.

To a certain extent, Bayern’s chintzy regional patriotism is just good marketing. The Oktoberfest photoshoots, the beer showers and the Trachten-themed special edition shirts are just a shortcut to authenticity in an increasingly globalised business. Yet there is also something more fundamental about Bayern’s Bavarianness. Something that goes to the heart of how the club is run.

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When Bayern president Uli Hoeness went to prison in 2014, one club insider compared it to the death of former CSU leader Franz-Josef Strauß, the most prominent Bavarian politician of post-war Germany. Few could argue with the comparison. Like Strauß, Hoeness was a formidable patriarch who had defined his organisation for decades, transforming it from a regional player into a national force. Like Strauß, he was a deeply divisive figure, blessed with an acid tongue and an enormous ego. Like Strauß, even his greatest critics would eventually miss his avuncular joie de guerre.

That very Bavarian mix of pomposity and charm has in turn become the model of leadership expected at FC Bayern, one many coaches have tried and failed to live up to. Niko Kovac, a Berliner, had the spikiness without the charm. Thomas Tuchel, a Swabian Bavarian, had the haughtiness without the heart. Pep Guardiola, perhaps seeing some parallels with catalanismo, opened his first press conference as Bayern coach with a self-consciously Bavarian “Grüß Gott”. Yet in the end, Munich never really suited him and he soon switched it for more cosmopolitan Manchester.

The last Bayern coach to eschew the model entirely was arguably Ottmar Hitzfeld. An impeccably polite and reserved man from the Swiss border, Hitzfeld won the Champions League and five league titles with Bayern and presided successfully over a team of ferocious egos like Stefan Effenberg, Oliver Kahn and Lothar Matthäus. Yet he himself remained the ultimate gentleman of his era, leaving the PR dirty work to the higher ups like Hoeness and Franz Beckenbauer.

Kompany has taken a similar approach. Like Hitzfeld, he refuses to be drawn into verbal spats, sponging up potential conflict with dignified confidence. And just as Hitzfeld always seemed more suited to the protestant ethic of Dortmund than the southern flair of Munich, so there is something fundamentally un-Bavarian about the Belgian’s level-headed sovereignty.

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While Hoeness’ leadership was directly modelled on the Bavarian politicians of his day, Kompany’s is the polar opposite. The current Bavarian premier Markus Söder is an archetypal modern culture warrior, the type of politician who will stir any pot of shit he can find in his pursuit of airtime. Most recently, he has adopted the infernal “stick to football” mantra, warning Germany’s national team players not to get involved in the politics of a World Cup in Trump’s USA.

Kompany, by contrast, has repeatedly shown where football can add welcome nuance to an increasingly toxic public debate. In February, he launched an impassioned defence of Vinicius Junior after the Brazilian was allegedly racially abused against Benfica. Last week, he spoke at length about the wider social significance of Marie-Louise Eta’s appointment at Union. On both occasions, his popularity among media and fans soared. The impression is of a man allergic to platitudes and polarisation, who acknowledges both the public responsibility and the political limits of his position as a football manager.

The shine may wear off. Jürgen Klopp was also once hailed as a breath of fresh air before familiarity and his own ego began to breed contempt. Things move fast in football and Kompany may soon return to Manchester City, where he will face a very different set of political and PR challenges.

Yet for now, at least, he deserves the praise. In two short years, Kompany has not only created one of the best Bayern teams of recent decades. He has also made the club itself far more likeable. And that, traditionally, has been the hardest job of all.

Played in Germany is completely free to read at the point of publication. If you would like to support my work, please consider taking out a paid subscription for full archive access. Alternatively, you can buy me a coffee via the link below.

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Football’s descent into self-parody continues apace. In the headline role this week: the African Football Confederation (CAF) and a piece of bureaucratic performance art titled “AFCON 2025”.

On Tuesday, the African federation retroactively stripped Senegal of the Cup of Nations title they won in January, handing it instead to the hosts and defeated finalists Morocco. Two months on from one of the most farcical major international finals in living memory (and pending a further legal challenge), the Moroccans were therefore handed one of the emptiest victories in football history. The rest of us were left wondering what to make of it all.

In Germany, the news was greeted with the usual self-assured hand-wringing reserved for the Global South. “African football has made itself irrevocably laughable,” declared 11Freunde’s morning newsletter on Wednesday, while kicker bemoaned “a devastating signal to all the other continents, who already take African football less seriously than they should”.

The implication - the outright declaration in some quarters - was that something like this could only happen in African football, where dysfunction and political corruption are rife. Yet as legitimate as those concerns may be, it is worth asking if that is really the whole picture here. Is this really just an African story? Is it really so unthinkable that something like this could happen in Europe?

To which the answer is: no. Only last season, the Bundesliga relegation fight was overshadowed by a similar saga involving VfL Bochum and Union Berlin. After Bochum’s goalkeeper was hit by a cigarette lighter thrown from the Union block, the game was suspended for half an hour before resuming under protests from the Bochum officials. It ended 0-0 on the pitch, but was later ruled as a 2-0 win for Bochum. Union duly launched several unsuccessful appeals, before the issue was ultimately shelved in April, more than four months after the game took place.

Even without any serious allegations of corruption or political chicanery, this bears comparison to the AFCON debacle. Here, too, the very notion of sporting competition was dissolved into an unedifying juridical squabble. In this case, that affected not only the two clubs involved, but also all the other relegation-threatened teams. As the Union-Bochum result rambled through the courtrooms, so the outcome of the entire relegation fight lingered in limbo like Schrödinger’s cat.

The danger of this should be obvious. Live sport is a spectacle. Its intrinsic value lies in its immediacy. Its fundamental promise is that a result - just or otherwise - will be reached in real time. If the action on the pitch can be endlessly disputed behind closed doors for weeks afterwards and ultimately communicated by press release, then why bother turning up at all? Why even turn on the TV?

At the time, both Union’s and Bochum’s club hierarchy made the case that it was their duty to act in the interest of their club. That is true enough, but do they not also have duties beyond that? To the spectators, to the competition, to the game itself?

German football was asking that question again this week after Bayern Munich’s 1-1 draw with Bayer Leverkusen last weekend. After seeing two of their players sent off, Bayern responded with a furious string of attacks on referee Christian Dingert and his colleagues. Former president Uli Hoeness described Dingert’s performance as “the worst I have ever seen from a referee in the Bundesliga”, while current CEO Jan-Christian Dreesen went even further.

“This was the high point of a phase in which we have been repeatedly confronted with questionable decisions,” Dreesen told Sky, reaching for his tin hat. “Whether in Hamburg, Dortmund or Leverkusen, there have been a lot of decisions that have gone against us.”

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This was met with consternation in the rest of German football. Not only because it was patently absurd to suggest a top-level conspiracy against a team who have won 12 of the last 13 Bundesliga titles, but also because it was very unlike Bayern. As kicker put it: “Bayern are starting to sound like Real Madrid - surely nobody wants that.”

Unlike Madrid, who have long made a habit of imagining conspiracies against them, Bayern have traditionally resisted the temptation to develop a victim complex. They have seen themselves instead as the natural statesmen of European football. Powerful, yes, but also responsible. The grown-ups in the room who eschewed the Super League, spent cautiously and repeatedly bailed out their smaller domestic rivals in the 2000s.

In that sense, they were always the footballing expression of the German establishment. A club with the charisma of Willy Brandt, the rhetorical venom of Helmut Schmidt and the parochial tub-thumping of Franz Josef Strauß. But above all a club with the stodgy pragmatism of Helmut Kohl or Angela Merkel, and one rewarded with similarly endless success. Like no other cultural entity, they embodied post-war Germany’s ability to be both ruthlessly competitive and deeply conscious of its own responsibility to others.

But what happens if there are no grown-ups in the room? In recent weeks, the two most powerful German politicians in the world have offered a depressing answer to that question. While Chancellor Friedrich Merz has equivocated over the US’ illegal war in Iran, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has said that Europe should not act as “a custodian for the old world order”. Both would presumably see themselves as pragmatists. Both have faced furious criticism at home and abroad for failing to defend international law.

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Meanwhile in the pretend world, Bayern have also crossed ever more red lines in their bid to keep up with less scrupulous rivals. First they broke a promise never to pay more than 100 million euros for a single player. Then came repeated attacks on the 50+1 rule. And now, they are going after the referees. They are, in the eyes of many, acting more and more in their own self-interest.

Which brings us back to AFCON. While the option to appeal a result may sometimes be necessary to protect the integrity of the game, the Morocco-Senegal example appears to set a dangerous precedent. Namely, that if you don’t like the result, you can simply protest it. It might take weeks to win in court and ruin the spectacle for everyone else, but if you end up with the prize money, who cares? For all the patronising chuckles in Europe this week, it is not at all unthinkable that Madrid, Bayern or any other superclub with world-class lawyers could apply the same logic to, say, a Champions League Final.

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After all, most of professional football already works on that basis. On the pitch, the toxic logic of VAR renders every outcome subject to suspicion. Off the pitch, the most powerful already operate primarily in their own self-interest, rather than that of the game. The more they do, the more they drag everyone else down with them.

Morocco fans may celebrate now, just as Real Madrid and Bayern fans may buy into their clubs’ narratives of crooked referees and media bias. But their joy will be short-lived. Just like international law, sport essentially works on a set of shared principles. And once you get rid of those, everything can unravel very quickly.

Played in Germany is completely free to read at the point of publication. If you would like to support my work, please consider taking out a paid subscription for full archive access. Alternatively, you can buy me a coffee via the link below.

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At the end of January, Berlin mayor Kai Wegner fired the starting gun on his city’s bid to host the Olympic Games. In 2026, Berlin will go up against Hamburg, Munich and the Rhine-Ruhr region in a race to be chosen as Germany’s official candidate to host the 2036, 2040 or 2044 Games. Yet for Wegner, the real struggle may be to convince his own electorate.

“Berlin wins with the Olympics” claims the bid’s confident official slogan, unveiled with much pomp at the velodrome last month. But not everyone is so sure. A recent survey by Der Tagesspiegel newspaper showed that around two thirds of Berliners are currently against the bid. As in many other places, the Olympics remain a deeply divisive issue. Unlike elsewhere, the debate in Berlin is not just about grassroots legacy and public spending. It is also about history, and the long shadow of Germany’s Nazi past.

Over the coming months, that debate will not just centre around the city’s major sporting venues like the Olympiastadion, the velodrome and the proposed beach volleyball court at the Brandenburg Gate. It will also be hashed out in the smaller, more forgotten corners of Berlin’s sporting landscape. Places like the Poststadion in the western district of Moabit.

This article was written for Aficionados Football Travel ahead of the “Beyond the Wall” tour of Berlin in April 2026. The full article is available to read for free here.

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The Aficionados tour is the perfect opportunity to discover how the football landscape of Germany’s capital city was impacted by the Berlin Wall. It will include visits to games at both Hertha BSC and 1. FC Union, as well as guided tours to some of the forgotten corners of Berlin’s football history.

Read more and sign up for the tour here.

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