As Freiburg players and supporters celebrated their farewell to the Dreisamstadion with a 3-0 win over Augsburg last week, Christian Streich had tears in his eyes. The 56-year-old was feeling melancholic about leaving Freiburg’s spiritual home of 67 years but also a little perturbed about what the future in the new 30,000-capacity Europa-Park-Stadion might hold.
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“I’m concerned,” he said with characteristic honesty. “Will we, the crowd and us, continue to stand together and live this spirit, even in hard times? Because they will come for sure. That will be the big challenge for us all. It’ll be crucial that we take our humility with us to the new ground.”
Freiburg will play their first game in the shiny new digs after the international week on October 16. But if their trip to Berlin on Saturday is anything to go by, Streich needn’t have worried about his side losing their appetite for hard work. A typically energetic and dogged 2-1 win over a hopeless Hertha Berlin in the Olympiastadion put them fourth in the league as the only unbeaten side left in the competition.
Maybe left-back Christian Gunter was far more serious than he sounded when he told the Einfach Fussball podcast last month that the only thing that could top the current happiness levels at Freiburg was qualification for the Champions League.
A finish in mid-table, as in the two seasons before (eighth and 10th), is the far likelier outcome. But even those results should be seen as minor miracles considering Freiburg’s annual player budget is a mere €40 million and that the team is shorter on shiny stars than a glum London sky in January. Yes, there’s veteran Nils Petersen, a former Bayern Munich player and the club’s record scorer (96 goals, ahead of Joachim Low on 83). The 32-year-old came off the bench to score his 30th goal as a sub.
But in truth, Streich, a butcher’s son turned football sage and the league’s voice of morality, is the only truly recognisable face beyond the Breisgau region in Germany’s sunny south west. He and the club have become synonymous in a way not seen in the league since Otto Rehhagel at Werder Bremen in the 1980s and 1990s. This December, he’ll be 10 years in the job.
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A decade of continuity is undoubtedly one of the reasons Freiburg have done so well of late. Quite a few of their main players, too, have been around for some time. They value the special atmosphere at the club, a place with “zero negativity”, as Gunter put it, where even the odd duff season is met with understanding, not jeers.
Streich was in charge when the club was relegated in 2014-15 but was allowed to stay on and helped the club go straight back up. A fall to 15th in 2017-18 after a seventh-place finish and Europa League football on their return to the Bundesliga passed off without any repercussions as well. Freiburg are different, which is why it’s hard to imagine Streich ever moving on to try and work his magic elsewhere.
Magic? Something close to it, for sure. Over the last couple of seasons, Freiburg have achieved results that are neither in line with their financial status nor the underlying performance figures. The chart below considers the rolling average of Freiburg’s expected goals (xG) for and against, with the dotted line indicating the overall trend (all data from Statsbomb via fbref)
A look at the figures since 2018 shows them consistently conceding more and better chances than they are able to create in attack (apart from a good spell halfway through last season).
In 2018-19, Freiburg’s “xG difference” (the over/underperformance of a team’s actual goal difference compared to their xG) was a colossal 19 — they scored five more goals than the models predicted in attack and conceded 14 fewer. That trend has seemed to continue in the current campaign. Their opponents have created better chances in five of their seven league games but they have won four and drew three.
This begs the question whether Streich has mostly been getting lucky or perhaps found ways to maximise Freiburg’s limited potential in ways that defeat straightforward analysis. That special togetherness is hard to quantify. It’s surely a factor, however.
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By being incredibly awkward to play against, pressing man-vs-man in midfield and defending with five at the back in recent months, Freiburg tend to drag better-skilled teams down to their level and force goals, often from set pieces. Four out of their nine goals have come from dead balls so far. Streich-ball shouldn’t work that well in theory, but it does, somehow.
This rather mysterious dimension to their relative success perhaps explains why the coach would be worried about the impending move. An extra 10,000 people in the ground will produce more income, but will they generate the same unique conditions that have seen the Bundesliga’s most self-effacing club thrive? At least they will have the memories.
Talking points
Bayern Munich lose! Julian Nagelsmann called the 2-1 home defeat by Frankfurt “avoidable”: shorthand for too many missed chances, more misplaced passes than usual, too big a gap between attack and defence and Dayot Upamecano and Manuel Neuer having off-days.
Despite all that, the champions could have easily won the game twice over if it hadn’t been for an inspired Kevin Trapp in the visitors’ goal. “The manager said we needed a superb keeper today,” the 31-year-old laughed.
At the other end of the pitch, Filip Kostic, the ex-striker (in the labour dispute-sense of the word, after his self-imposed absence) became the first Frankfurt player since Jan Aage Fjortoft (November 2000) to score a winning goal in the Bavarian capital.
Fresh from dismantling Celtic in Scotland, Bayer Leverkusen beat Arminia Bielefeld 4-0 away on Sunday to go level on points with Bayern at the top of the table.
Patrick Schick, who scored twice, and Florian Wirtz, this season’s most exciting young talent, were the outstanding players in a fluid performance that has supporters dreaming of a title challenge — for the next two weeks, in any case. Leverkusen will host Bayern when Bundesliga hostilities resume after the international break.
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Cologne extended their unbeaten run to five games with a 3-1 win over Greuther Furth. The Franconians are by some distance the worst side in the league but it’d be unfair to call Cologne manager Steffen Baumgart a flat-cap bully. The 49-year-old, whose Peaky Blinder tribute has inspired a fashion trend among supporters, has shown that his all-out-pressing game can cause problems for the best sides in the league, including in a closely fought 3-2 defeat to Bayern in August.
Sixth spot, with just over a fifth of the season gone, is a reward for a job exceedingly well done.
(Top Photo: Matthias Hangst/Getty Images)