He may have finished only third at the Ballon D’Or, but Manuel Neuer now knows he has the affection of his nation.
The Germany goalkeeper can go and see, whenever he chooses, his newly sculptured likeness prominently displayed, in life-size replica, at the Madame Tussaud’s waxwork museum in Berlin.
Neuer visited Berlin’s Tussaud’s last week during the long winter break Bundesliga players have been enjoying since the penultimate weekend in December.
A cynic might suggest that Bayern Munich's Neuer will feel no busier for the next three weeks than he was ambling around the tourist sites of the German capital.
A cynic could add that so rarely threatened is the defence of the Bundesliga leaders that Neuer's Bayern would still win the 2014/15 title if they had an inanimate wax statue that was 1.8 metres tall in their goalmouth for the next 17 league matches.
At the halfway point of the season, Bayern have dropped just six points.
They have let in a mere four goals from their 17 matches, and lost none of those.
Borussia Dortmund – the last team to deprive them of the Bundesliga crown or genuinely chase them at the top in recent years – sit 16 places and 30 points lower down in the league table.
Can there be any suspense in this title race?
In theory, the likeliest other team to supply it would be tonight’s opposition to Bayern, as Wolfsburg are second in the table. But they already trail Bayern by 11 points, and they can hardly feel emboldened by precedent.
Since 2008/09, when Wolfsburg upset the hierarchy of German domestic football by winning their only Bundesliga championship, they have met Bayern 11 times, drawing once and losing the rest.
In truth, the one club that seems most capable of tripping up Bayern’s steady march to their third consecutive Bundesliga shield is Bayern Munich themselves.
The most intense competition in Germany’s top flight right now is probably the individual scraps for first-team places in coach Pep Guardiola’s lavishly assembled Bayern squad.
The current transfer window has seen the departure of one of their many gifted attacking talents, Xherdan Shaqiri, to Inter Milan.
He leaves a tightly packed bottleneck.
Guardiola still has Arjen Robben, Franck Ribery, Thomas Muller and Mario Gotze to pick from for three roles playing behind and around Robert Lewandowski, the centre forward.
And that jostling will get fiercer when Thiago Alcantara returns to full fitness.
Bayern’s suave Spain international hopes to be ready by March.
Then there is the jostling deeper in midfield.
Once Javi Martinez and Philipp Lahm are back from injury lay-offs, how will Guardiola accommodate both Xabi Alonso and Bastian Schweinsteiger?
Those questions can be useful, week by week, for Guardiola to keep each of Bayern’s serial winners alert, watchful of their starting XI status.
However, when they speak publicly, Bayern’s stars cannot help but acknowledge they are already thinking of bigger challenges that Wolfsburg, Dortmund or Leverkusen.
“If we are to become champions early, we mustn’t let our efforts slip even by one per cent,” Robben told Welt am Sonntag.
“That would harm our play in the [Uefa] Champions League.”
Bayern’s season truly restarts on February 17 against the Ukrainian club Shaktar Donetsk when the Champions League enters their midweek timetable.
Tonight, their players, and Wolfsburg’s, will turn their minds to things more important than sport.
They will pause to remember the Wolfsburg midfielder Junior Malanda, who was killed in a car accident just three weeks ago. He was 20, a Belgian Under 21 international who had contributed a great deal to some of Wolfsburg’s more impressive performances this season, notably the big wins against Leverkusen and Mainz.
“When you look back and think of certain moments you had together, it’s not easy to avoid the feelings welling up,” Diego Benaglio, the Wolfsburg captain and goalkeeper, said of the young colleague who lost his life.
“But we will go out onto the field determined to be concentrated and professional.”
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