Imagine you're a professional football player and your boss thinks The Office is a genuine documentary charting the exceptional motivational skills of a middle manager from Slough. You come to work, a demoralised place populated by those who neither want nor should be there – on account of being either a little too good or just too bad – and you're trying to raise your game one last time, for the match of the season. You know this is about survival, and you're up for it. But then your manager reverts to type and puts up a poster in the dressing room that even Avram Grant would have been too embarrassed to touch:
"Every morning a player from Eintracht wakes up,
He knows he will have to run faster and harder than the best player of our opponent, otherwise he will lose,
Every morning an opponent wakes up,
He knows he will have to be better than each and every Eintracht player, otherwise he will lose against us,
When the sun comes up, you have to be better than any other player!"
Can you feel your will to live dissipating like a cheap eau de toilette at this point? Do you instinctively grasp that all is lost when your leader, the revered football expert Christoph Daum, exposes you to this psycho-babble, an insult to your intelligence? (If you need to work harder to beat your opponent but he has to work harder to beat you, doesn't that suggest that you're both as good as each other? And if both sides just keep working harder and harder, doesn't the essential equation remain unchanged? Nevermind.)
Credit where it's due. No one could have blamed the Frankfurt players for doing exactly what the Wolfsburg playmaker Diego did in a Mannheim hotel on Saturday – he walked out of the team meeting and went awol – but they stuck at it, at least to a degree. They defended, sat back, hoped for the best, for some lucky break. And they got a couple of those.
Ralf Fährmann saved a penalty from Lucas Barrios in the 12th minute, then reacted well to thwart a few more Dortmund chances. The teams went in 0-0 at half-time, somehow. Daum could yet imagine a scenario where his team saved themselves from the drop while the champions, hampered by the combined effects of "yellow fever" (Süddeutsche Zeitung) in the city and alcohol, would keep wasting chances.
Then they scored. Sebastian Rode headed the ball in after good work from Halil Altintop and Theofanis Gekas a minute into the second half. It was against the run of play but who cared. Results elsewhere meant that Frankfurt were back in it, at least in with a chance to make the relegation play-off as 16th. Unfortunately the miracle lasted little longer than the substitute Marcel Titsch-Rivero's first match of the season. The 21-year-old midfielder was on for a full 43 seconds before committing a professional foul on Marcel Schmelzer – the fastest dismissal in Bundesliga history.
By that stage Frankfurt were 2-1 down, looking utterly defeated and well on their way to Bundesliga 2. Barrios's header in the 90th minute sealed their fourth relegation in 15 years. The league's official site summed up the performance: "Lethargic, emotionless, anaemic". Daum, meanwhile, was spouting the usual nonsense. "Unlike Borussia Dortmund we have a quiet, carried by disappointment," said the 57-year-old, while his players sneaked into the team bus through a sea of black-and-yellow madness.
The chairman, Heribert Bruchhagen, was trying to look in charge and sound resolute. "Our first job is to find a new manager," said the 62-year-old, who will have to put up with a new sporting director taking over part of his duties.
Bruchhagen was chiefly responsible for six years of financial and sporting stability but his uncharacteristic gamble on the retro-shamanic Daum ("Mr Bruchhagen must have had some powder in his coffee," Uli Hoeness joked at the time) misfired badly. Daum picked up three points from 21 to make a terrible run worse. Frankfurt, seventh at Christmas under the super-nerdy guidance of Michael Skibbe, scored a total of seven goals in 2011 to secure eight points. It will, without a doubt, go down as the worst second-half offering since Prince followed up Mountains with Alexa de Paris on the 12-inch B side in 1986. "The table doesn't lie. We played a disastrous second half of the season; we can't complain," said Bruchhagen.
To be fair to Eintracht, they were beset by a freakish amount of injuries, especially at the back. They could not figure out a way to get Gekas scoring again and fell victim to an unlikely revival from Gladbach. In a year that saw Mainz and Hannover reach the Europa League and Kaiserslautern finish seventh – unbelievable – you couldn't even blame them for dreaming of glory during the winter break.
As it is, their strange collapse is weirdly fitting for this upside-down season: while an army of nondescript, unfashionable sides roared like lions and plenty of big names fought tooth and nail against demise (Stuttgart, Bremen, Wolfsburg), Eintracht, the very epitome of dour mid-table respectability, sadly, could not stay true to themselves.
Talking points
Wolfsburg looked all set for a date with Joe Black but narrowly managed to miss the appointment. Hoffenheim were leading 1-0 – a result that would have consigned Wolves to the second division as things stood – before two goals from the Croatian striker Mario Mandzukic and a deflected fluke from Grafite's backside turned it around for Felix Magath's side in the Rhein-Neckar-Arena.
"I'm happy that they woke up in time and earned themselves longer holidays," said Magath, who had characteristically threatened to give the squad only two weeks off. It is unclear, however, if the six-hour journey back to Wolfsburg on a chartered train, together with 500 fans, was meant to be a reward or a punishment. "It's shame you're not here, it's a great party," the captain Marcel Schäfer, left behind for a TV interview, was told by Sascha Riether on his mobile phone, live on air. Riether's voice carried all the conviction of one of these poor reporters who have to make out that "the atmosphere is building all the time here" – 10 hours before the first punter shows up.
To everybody's surprise, Diego turned up for training on Sunday as if nothing had happened. By deserting the team a few hours before kick-off – the midfielder had been left out of the starting XI – the 26-year-old embarrassed himself and the club: Wolfsburg could name only 17 professionals on the team-sheet. Diego sent an apologetic text message to his team-mates on Saturday night but will not look forward to further service under Magath, a strict disciplinarian. Scarily, the manager has hinted at the possibility of sticking with the Brazilian, who will be fined heavily.
Half a million people crammed into Dortmund's city centre to celebrate the championship on Sunday morning. Kevin Grosskreutz wasn't the only player to be overwhelmed by the emotions. "I see into the eyes of the people and I see their love for us," the midfielder said, quite poetically. The open-top bus tour was the last item on an extensive party programme that started with more out-of-control beer showers – Jürgen Klopp, CEO Watzke and the press officer were ambushed – and continued with a festive dinner, followed by more beer, more singing and dancing. Even Bayern felt the need to join in the chorus – full-page ads were taken out in local papers to congratulate the best and best-loved champions in recent years.
The mood was more subdued at Gladbach, understandably so. Lucien Favre's men capped a great run of three wins with a 1-1 draw at Hamburg but will now have to hold off the yo-yo specialists VfL Bochum in the relegation play-offs (first leg, Thursday night) to complete the comeback. "It's not over," said the goalkeeper Marc-Andre ter Stegen. "We have to play better otherwise we won't make it," added the midfielder Marco Reus. The manager Lucien Favre was handed a lucky plastic pig by a couple of fans on Sunday but Borussia's real lucky charm in recent weeks has been Stefan Effenberg. Ever since the former great announced that he would front a consortium looking to take over the club (by democratic means), the team's fortunes have improved markedly.
Mario Gómez won the "cannon" for the leading goalscorer. He scored the equaliser in the 2-1 win over Stuttgart to take his tally to 28, more than any other Bayern striker since Karl-Heinz Rummenigge in 1981. It's a remarkable figure, considering that the 25-year-old only started playing regularly in October and missed a dozen or so sitters to boot.
The Bavarians are already looking forward to prospective Champions League qualifier meetings with Arsenal. And it has been decided that playing with a half-decent defence would be advisable next season, so Man City's Jérôme Boateng and Leverkusen's central midfielder Arturo Vidal are scheduled to join the new-arrival Manuel Neuer.
And: Leverkusen held on to second spot with a 1-0 win (Hanno Balitsch header) at Freiburg. In hindsight, it was churlish to bring up the bottler cliches last week. If Bayer can be trusted to get one thing right, it's to finish as runners-up.
Results: Bayern 2-1 Stuttgart, Hoffenheim 1-3 Wolfsburg, Dortmund 3-1 Frankfurt, Hannover 3-1 Nürnberg, Hamburg 1-1 Gladbach, Mainz 2-1 St Pauli, Köln 2-1 Schalke, Freiburg 0-1 Leverkusen, Kaiserslautern 3-2 Bremen.
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