Previously we looked at the best and worst Premier League champions. What happens if we try the same exercise for the Bundesliga?
The Premier League has existed since 1992. The Bundesliga is nearly twice as old, with its first season in 1963. Add to this the lack of a central stats website containing all historic data for the German top-flight, and it was clear the approach needed to change.
Manual data extraction was relatively straightforward for the Premier League but would prove too tedious for the Bundesliga.
I’m greatly indebted to Amanda Iglesias Moreno’s excellent Medium article on analysing the Bundesliga – my code is adapted from hers.
Please note that these scores are not directly comparable to those calculated for the Premier League teams due to the presence of different metrics.
3. 2016/17 Bayern Munich: 7.82
Carlo Ancelotti’s first season in charge after Pep Guardiola’s departure for Manchester City saw Bayern win its 26th Bundesliga title, becoming the first team to win five consecutive championships. Bayern put eight past Hamburg at home and beat Wolfsburg 6-0 away on the way to scoring 89 goals. It also had the third-highest average possession of all the teams studied (69%).
2. 2015/16 Bayern Munich: 7.95
The previous season saw Bayern win a fourth consecutive Bundesliga, with Robert Lewandowski becoming the first player in nearly 40 years to score more than 30 goals in a season. This team conceded the fewest goals of all the teams studied (17) and had the second-highest average possession (70.1%).
1. 2012/13 Bayern Munich: 8.76
The Treble-winning Bayern side won the Bundesliga, DFB Pokal and Champions League, becoming the first German team to do so. It led the Bundesliga table from start to finish, breaking or equalling 30 Bundesliga records on the way, including the most points ever (91), the fastest league win (28 matchdays), the most wins (31), fewest losses (1) and the largest goal difference (+80).
2021/22: ?
It’s no surprise to see Bayern Munich dominate this list, having won more than half of all Bundesliga titles. Will any team challenge their dominance this season? Check back later for an updated list.
Methodology
Historic stats for club performance are available from fbref.com. These have been supplemented with data from transfermarkt.co.uk.
The script uses the Beautiful Soup library to extract the data from the HTML source code. The script then stores it in a Pandas DataFrame and exports to an Excel spreadsheet. Each DataFrame is exported to a separate worksheet.
Once in Excel, I standardised the data, renaming columns and removing unnecessary rows and columns. I then combined the data into a single worksheet, normalised, and averaged to give an overall adjusted score for each league champion since 2000.