Bayern winning 10. The premier league having a “big six” and only 2 different teams qualifying for UCL in years (Leicester and Newcastle). La Liga being a 2 horse race with occasional atletico. Even serie A has 5-6 good teams and every one doesn’t compete. Ligue 1 is only PSG. How do fans just accept that domestic leagues have no parity? There is no feasible way anyone can ever expect Brighton to win the PL when if they have one good year, their best players are bought. Big clubs are insanely well established and small teams can’t complete without getting bought out. It seems so unfair to me. Like, I feel like if the European scene was more fair with better parity, Dortmund should’ve been able to keep Haaland and Bellingham as their 2 starlets. The best example of this is Lewandowksi at Dortmund. He wins the league with Dortmund twice, loses to Bayern in the UCL final, and then just joins the best team. That was the best move for his career. It feels like the scene is just scene so a team like Dortmund can never compete with Bayern. Or how after Real beat Atletico in 2014, Atletico’s keeper joined Real 4 years later, and now Real remains the super team with Atletico just trying to qualify for UCL knockouts.
As a German football fan, I think that the boredom of our league and the decline of many traditional clubs with huge fandoms is the price that we pay for our relatively strict investment rules: At least 50% of a professional club have to be owned by a Verein: Very simply spoken, a Verein in German civil law is a non-profit organization more or less democratically run by its members. The only exception to that rule are clubs that are traditionally linked to a cooperation (the so-called Leverkusen clause). In the last years that rule has been avoided either by founding a Verein pro forma or by investing in a club for long enough that the Leverkusen clause becomes valid.
This rule has a big advantages: It prevents our clubs from becoming too dependent on investors, so that our league is still the German football championship and not the UAE wealth championship. It has a lot of disadvantages though: Due to a lack of money, many German clubs cannot afford world class players anymore and even mediocre EPL clubs can pay more than big Bundesliga clubs. And there is a risk of „too much democracy“ which can lead to decisions that are rather populist than based on sports expertise. Even Bayern and Dortmund are often shockingly chaotic in their leadership. Many of the presidents/patriarchs of the clubs have become memes.
This led to the decline of many big, traditional clubs from big cities: Only 5 out of 16 state capitals currently have a Bundesliga side, the second-largest city in the county hasn’t had a Bundesliga side since 2018, cities like Cologne, Frankfurt and even Berlin have had seasons without a Bundesliga side as well. Schalke, which has been one of the top clubs in the country only about 20 years ago, is now fighting against relegation to the 3rd division - and against bankruptcy. And that are only a few examples. On the other hand, we have lots of small, but well-run clubs that have developed from amateur to Bundesliga in the last decade.
I think, the Bundesliga really, the clubs aren’t really meant to be world class football clubs, but rather more or less places for the community to bond over. The emphasis isn’t on winning, it’s just having a good Sunday with the mates, no? :-)
Watching a team which the fans own, I can see the wholesomeness in that. But, the football club is still pretty much capped for ambition, due to Bayern and how the Bundesliga is set up. Meaning, it can never really ever be a world beater, just a selling club at best.