Bayern beaten as Bundesliga’s return is haunted by spectre of ghost games

Mönchengladbach beat a Covid-ravaged Bayern Munich in front of empty stands as the league made a downbeat return

There had been serious doubt over whether it would happen and even though it eventually did, many pondered whether it should have. In most other contexts this game would have been something to savour rather than to fret over, with Borussia Mönchengladbach the closest Bayern Munich have had to a bogey team during their near-decade of plenty, thus providing a worthy curtain-raiser for the Bundesliga’s Rückrunde.

Perhaps there should have been some relief as Robert Lewandowski rolled Nico Elvedi before smashing home authentically, in time-honoured style, for the first Bundesliga goal of 2022. We had a storyline too, childhood Bayern fan Florian Neuhaus scoring with Gladbach’s first shot of the game and prompting an improbable comeback win for the visitors, and the merest soupçon of a title race to come.

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Elsewhere in the Bundesliga there were plenty of other welcome indicators that it was business as usual – an Anthony Modeste headed goal for Köln, a thrilling match involving Borussia Dortmund in which the spectacle was almost entirely fuelled by, and their win achieved despite, their defensive incompetence – but this wasn’t quite the real thing.

As Erling Haaland and Martin Hinteregger confronted each other as the Norwegian struggled to retrieve the ball from the net and get on with the game after Jude Bellingham’s equaliser for BVB, Haaland shouted at the Eintracht Frankfurtdefender that he was a “fucking idiot”, with viewers getting it loud and clear all over again in the echoes of the empty Deutsche Bank Park. There may have been amusement value at earwigging the players last year, but the novelty has worn off.

On this opening weekend of the league’s second half of the season, it was impossible to escape the shadow of Covid-19. Bayern were at the heart of it and not just because of the long-awaited return of Joshua Kimmich, who stumbled into his well-documented vaccine controversy before Christmas and was fit and well enough to play for the first time since November (for the record, he “played outstandingly well in the first 75 minutes,” according to Julian Nagelsmann, before an understandable swell of fatigue in the game’s closing stages).

For once, there could be no groaning about Kimmich being shunted to right-back. This was a genuine sporting emergency. On paper, Bayern’s line-up looked almost as formidable as ever, and casual observers might have wondered whether the midweek questions over whether the game could go ahead were overblown. Yet after a week in which players at the club’s Säbener Straße training base were separated into three different changing rooms to try and stop the spread, it was a clear case of next man up.

Marcel Sabitzer was shoehorned into the left-back spot, the teenager Malik Tillmann given a first start on the left of midfield and Benjamin Pavard given a go at his preferred position of centre-back. There was even the sight of Paul Wanner, who only turned 16 on 22 December, stepping off a bench full of kids to become the youngest first-team player in the club’s history.

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It was a game that Bayern could, and probably should, have won – with Yann Sommer looking somewhere near his best in the Gladbach goal – and Nagelsmann had already embraced the challenge in the days leading up to the game. You could argue that not many coaches in his fashionable trainers would do the same, or that Bayern’s superiority has earned a level of comfort in which unfavourable conditions in a game are not a global difference-maker.

Nagelsmann was blunt enough about his side’s culpability in the Gladbach equaliser, for example (“I don’t know why we’re defending it like that,” he told Dazn, exasperated), yet even he found himself incapable of avoiding the elephant in the room in picking apart the defeat. Sabitzer, playing a full 90 minutes for the first time in Bayern colours, was “dead after an hour” according to the coach. “Football is different from getting on the treadmill or running through the forest,” he added.

It all felt, though, like detail rather than desperately important. The dreaded emptiness in the stands will take some getting used to again, though hopefully not for too long. The Geisterspiele – ghost games – were back and if a dearth of atmosphere doesn’t help football anywhere, it is particularly strongly felt in a league which counts noise and rancour from the stands as one of its greatest assets.

There were spectators at Hertha’s game with Köln, with the Berlin senate allowing a 3,000 capacity at outdoor events – but by the time matchday staff and media had been admitted, that left room for 2,000 paying spectators. Better than nothing, perhaps, but a pretty sad sight in the Olympiastadion, which holds a touch under 75,000. The available tickets were raffled among season ticket holders, with 100 given over to the away side.

This time, there is resistance to the concept as well. The Union Berlin president, Dirk Zingler, and Dortmund CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke have both accused politicians of using football to score political points rather than really actioning what’s needed. While Bavaria’s state president, Markus Söder, took to Sport 1’s Doppelpass show on Sunday to defend Geisterspiele, and to detail that he was “totally annoyed” by a lack of national uniformity in German football’s approach, patience in boardrooms is wearing thin.

Speaking to Der Spiegel last week, Watzke suggested that “with 8,000 spectators in our place (at the 81,000-capacity Signal Iduna Park), the risk of infection would be very slim, and everybody knows it.” With supporters still attending in bigger numbers in England, Spain and Italy, fatigue is not just an issue for on the pitch. “Every match behind closed doors costs us €4m,” continued Watzke. “It’s economically unbearable, and it also pulls apart the link between the club and the fans bit by bit.”

If Söder is right to say that Germany is not out of the woods with the virus, then it’s also fair to point out that the Bundesliga has pandemic issues that still need addressing too.

Friday: Bayern 1-2 Gladbach. Sat: Frankfurt 2-3 Dortmund, Freiburg 2-2 Arminia Bielefeld, Fürth 0-0 Stuttgart, Hoffenheim 3-1 Augsburg, Leipzig 4-1 Mainz, Leverkusen 2-2 Union Berlin. Sun: Bochum 1-0 Wolfsburg, Hertha 1-3 Köln.

Talking points

• Back on the field, Köln are thriving under Steffen Baumgart, with Modeste’s ninth (!) header of the season taking him up to 12 goals in the Bundesliga, setting his team on the way to a 3-1 win at Hertha and moving them up to sixth. What the Berliners would give for a touch of that upward mobility, though at least the loan move of Krzysztof Piatek (and his €4m annual wages) to Fiorentina might give sporting director Fredi Bobic a bit of latitude in the transfer market this month.

• It could be worse for Hertha – they could be Wolfsburg. Florian Kohfeldt’s team are in freefall, losing at Bochum in Sunday’s late game to make it six Bundesliga defeats on the spin, and eight in all competitions. “We can’t be too dramatic because we still have 16 games to go,” striker Wout Weghorst told Dazn, “but we have to look at where we stand and change something really, really quickly.”

• Wolfsburg are now in a relegation battle with, among others, Augsburg, whose new headline signing Ricardo Pepi made a debut as substitute in the loss at Hoffenheim (who, remarkably, are third). “We have to calm down a bit with him,” a protective Florian Niederlechner said of his new American strike partner.