The European club football season gets underway tonight, with a flurry of arguments between the two domestic competitions that believe most strongly in their own excellence.
By late Thursday, representatives of the super-wealthy English Premier League will have taken on teams from the home of the reigning world champions, Germany, four times.
At the least, we should expect bouncy atmospheres. Borussia Dortmund host Arsenal in the Westfalen arena, which symbolizes something the Bundesliga boasts most about – huge attendance numbers and a lively, authentic fan culture.
Bayern Munich, the most popular German club, host Manchester City. In the Europa League, Wolfsburg, examples of a different sort of business model, welcome Everton, a homely institution compared with some of the corporate juggernauts of the Premier League. With their maximum quotas of a possible four qualifiers apiece in the Champions League, it is inevitable that English and German clubs bump into each other frequently.
But a triple bill on Match Day 1 is unusual. Besides the meeting in Bavaria between the German champions and English league champions, and the Dortmund-Arsenal tie, Schalke are at Stamford Bridge to play Chelsea.
Current form makes this one open to the most confident forecasts. Troubled Schalke have plunged to third from bottom of their league table, while Chelsea top a Premier League which reads as evidence of the unpredictability that English football’s cheerleaders say makes it so compelling. Aston Villa, Swansea and Southampton sit second, third and fourth.
As Jose Mourinho, the Chelsea manager, put it at the outset of this season: “People sometimes in other countries say, ‘Our league is the best in the world’. But how can a league of two teams be the best in the world? We [in England] should be more proud of our league.”
Is the Bundesliga so top-heavy that only two title contenders, Bayern and Dortmund, can be realistically identified every August?
Sceptics would say that it is in danger of hosting the most monotonous title race among the major European countries.
Bayern’s procession to the 2014 crown broke records for the quickness in which the title was clinched, securing the crown even more easily than Juventus in Italy and Paris Saint-Germain in France.
In Spain, Atletico Madrid broke the Barcelona-Real duopoly, while the last Premier League denouement was gripping: with four rounds left to play, five clubs still had a chance to seize the title.
That sort of drama helps grip massive television audiences. The Bundesliga might pull more fans into arenas each weekend, but across the world, demand for “the Prem” soars by comparison.
The income English clubs earn from overseas TV rights is worth, at nearly €800 million (Dh3.8 billion), around 10 times what the Bundesliga fetches from markets outside Germany.
That sort of money brings in more superstars to English football than to German clubs.
When Chelsea sold striker Romelu Lukaku to Everton in August, Mourinho asked: “How many clubs in other countries can spend £27 million on a player like Everton did? In Spain? Three. In Germany? Only two.”
He meant Bayern or Dortmund.
Everton can line up Lukaku against Wolfsburg, whose summer recruiting for a new centre-forward led them to Nicklas Bendtner, a striker who, at Arsenal, had become emblematic of how great, youthful expectations were not achievable in the cut-and-thrust of the Premier League.
Might the same be said of Shinji Kagawa?
The Japanese won two Bundesliga championships with Borussia Dortmund and moved amid fanfare to Manchester United, where, after a pair of disappointing seasons, he left last month to rejoin Dortmund.
On Saturday, Kagawa, evidently more at home in the Ruhr than in Lancashire, scored in a superb first match back at Borussia.
He will look forward to taking on Arsenal, where Mesut Ozil, Per Mertesacker and Lukas Podolski, three German world champions, serve. That has the makings of a tight contest. In the group stage last season, the teams met and both won the away game.
Bayern and City are also revisiting a collision from 2013/14, which resulted in a pair of away wins.
Chelsea last year beat Schalke 3-0 home and away, and had the good luck to avoid Bayern in the knockouts. The German champions went on to eliminate Arsenal and Manchester United.
If Bayern played in the Premier League, there is a fair chance they would be winning it, if not as easily as they conquered the last Bundesliga, fairly regularly.
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