Xabi Alonso's Bayer Leverkusen won the Bundesliga title after a shift in their recruitment strategy, explains sporting director Simon Rolfes; intrinsic motivation is key; watch Bayern Munich vs Leverkusen live on Sky Sports Football this Saturday; kick-off 5. Comment and Analysis ghostgoal. Over in Leverkusen, they will tell you that it was the Bayern Munich game in September of last season that had them believing they might be onto something.
Xabi Alonso's side had won their first three games when they went to Munich and drew Then we play in Munich. Okay, we are competitive, really at the top. It was proof they were at least a match for the team that had won the Bundesliga 11 times in a row. As it turned out, Leverkusen were rather better than that, powering to the title and becoming the first unbeaten team in the competition's long history. Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player.
Okay, we cannot do exactly what we want, but at the end we will win, you know? If we push and we push, we will score, we will score. And that makes it really special because it did not stop after winning the Bundesliga title.
We continued to score in the last minute. The unbeaten record has now gone but Leverkusen remain the team most likely to challenge Bayern. That knack for late goals remains. It won them the Supercup against Stuttgart with 10 players. Their winner on the opening weekend came in the st minute. And while competing with Bayern financially is out of the question - Leverkusen prefer to talk of top four and measuring themselves against Leipzig - they still have Xabi Alonso and a squad that has been built with some of the savviest recruitment around.
To explain how all this happened, how Leverkusen became the envy of Europe in upsetting the odds, it takes more than Alonso. It required a recruitment rethink, one Rolfes now freely admits was rooted in the mistakes that were made along the way.
