The Bundesliga title race has been dominated by two clubs over the past 15 years.
Bayern Munich have been the serial winners of the league, with only Bayer Leverkusen being able to beat them out over the course of a season in recent years (2023/2024).
In their first season under manager Vincent Kompany, FC Bayern comfortably won the league once again.
Their start to the second year has been equally amazing.
They have won all six of their league games so far, scoring 25 goals while only conceding three.
Conversely, Borussia Dortmund are coming off a disappointing season by their standards.
After a horrible first half of the season, the club decided to part ways with former player Nuri Şahin as their manager and hired Niko Kovač as their new coach.
Under the Croatian coach, BVB stabilized quickly and returned to the UEFA Champions League places by the end of the 2024/2025 season.
They are now in second place in the Bundesliga, four points behind FC Bayern.
Looking at the history of Der Klassiker in Munich over the last couple of years, Dortmund have had a rough time, losing eight in a row in Bavaria with a combined score of 35-7 in favour of FC Bayern.
However, Dortmund managed a win and a draw in their last two games in Munich, so the trend currently seems to be in their favor.
In this tactical analysis and tactical preview, we will examine what makes FC Bayern so strong, where they can still be hurt, and what Borussia Dortmund need to do to avoid falling back too far in the title race this season.
Bayern Munich Play Between The Lines
Four points is not a huge gap at this point in the season, but looking at the six matchdays so far, there is just no denying that Vincent Kompany’s team has been by far the best team in the Bundesliga, and therefore, they still are heavily favoured in the game on Saturday.
Therefore, they are expected to dominate possession even in the game against Borussia Dortmund, so they will have to execute their ideas and principles on a very high level once again.
With their style of play, they manage to create many opportunities for their high-class attacking players in the final third, and they will look to do the same against their rival once again.
One constant factor for FC Bayern under Vincent Kompany is their triangles on the wing.
They are not static at all; often, they are formed by dynamic movements.
They are used as tools for positional rotations on the wing to frequently create chaos for the defenders.
They usually let their full-backs move forward into the midfield and position them between the lines.
This one movement now leads to one defender being caught inside the triangle, unable to have any impact against the ball, and FC Bayern can easily play the ball past him.
They use these forward movements of defending players rather often, and it works wonders for them against teams defending in a deep block against them, so the majority of the Bundesliga.
In the picture above, Joshua Kimmich is moving forward when the centre-back gets the ball, opening up space right in front of the backline to dribble the ball into.
It also provokes Eintracht Frankfurt‘s two attackers to adjust their positioning slightly; instead of both players being able to press forward, one of them now has to account for Kimmich.
Once again, Kimmich doesn’t just move forward a little bit; he moves into the space between the lines, forcing a reaction from the block again.
These little tweaks in positioning often allow Bayern to play vertical or diagonal passes, which means they no longer have all eleven players behind the ball.
Examining FC Bayern’s positional play, they consistently try to stay between the lines rather than putting pressure on the backline.
Examining the situation in the game against Frankfurt, four players are positioned between the lines, just in front of the backline and ahead of the midfield row.
This allowed them to find diagonal passes out of their triangular rotations and for their pacey attacking players to make runs behind the backline.
In this scenario, they switched play through their holding midfielder in the centre of the pitch.
What’s really interesting about the way Kompany has his men play in these situations is the fact that while they have one of the most prolific strikers in the world right now in Harry Kane, they use him as a kind of false nine in these types of situations.
As we can see in the picture above, Kane is dropping back diametrically out of the central striker position into the half space to receive the ball.
This forces a centre-back to react and at least follow him a bit.
This split-second decision now opens up the window for a through ball from Kimmich towards the diagonal-moving attackers who are making runs behind the backline.
Bayern manages to thread the ball so well and breaks the lines so often under Vincent Kompany; it is really fascinating to watch.
So, for Borussia Dortmund, it will be very important to keep the spaces between the lines minimal and not be dragged out of position by those rotations and Kane’s movements.
If they want to win the game, they need to limit the opportunity for line-breaking passes, especially controlling Kimmich and his ability to play dangerous through balls.
Ways To Hurt The Unbeatable
While FC Bayern have won every single game in the Bundesliga so far this season, most of them rather convincingly, there have still been a couple of sequences and moments when they have looked rather beatable.
Vincent Kompany wants his team to be dominant, and to achieve that, they are an incredibly aggressive team in terms of where and how they trigger their press.
While it works out for them most of the time, sometimes also due to the huge gap in individual class between their opponents and them, they are a rather impatient team without the ball.
A couple of teams have already had some good moments exploiting this weakness this season.
FC Bayern won 4-0 against Werder Bremen, and the result was probably the best part of the game from the perspective of Werder coach Horst Steffen.
However, they had a couple of very decent moments in the build-up around the half-hour mark, and it could be used as a blueprint for other teams.
In the first couple of moments, FC Bayern got precisely what they wanted out of the situation.
They triggered their press on the first pass from the goalkeeper to the centre-back and managed to force Werder to play towards their full-back.
Werder employs a lot of shadow movements in their narrow double-pivot, but adapted slightly in this game, pushing one central midfielder high up the pitch and dropping their right winger back towards the full-back on their side.
They did this for two reasons.
The first reason is to drag the full-back Konrad Laimer out of his position.
Bayern played a lot of man-marking in these situations, and Laimer was always moving forward without any hesitation.
The second reason was to open up the space in front of the full-back and create a gap between the first line of play and the rest of the players on the pitch.
Now the higher midfielder in Jens Stage was able to drop back and receive a vertical pass behind the first line of press.
But they didn’t even stop there; they knew that Bayern were going to defend that aggressively as well, so they just played two vertical passes in a row, completely taking out five Bayern players.
From there on, their attacking midfielder had the ball and multiple lay-off options.
This forced FC Bayern’s centre-backs to step up into the opposing half often and vacate the space in the defensive centre, which now left the right side of the backline completely unguarded.
Unfortunately, while the idea was very good, Werder struggled with executing it often.
Here, Romano Schmid plays a bad lay-off, and Bayern are able to recover the position behind the ball, but they found a way to hurt Goliath.
Dortmund Need To Find Their Own Way
While it sounds appealing to have a blueprint to outdo FC Bayern in the build-up, there are still a couple of downsides to it.
It is a very risky way of building up, and considering that Borussia Dortmund should not face as big a talent gap as Werder Bremen did, they are not really forced into taking this big a risk to achieve what they want in the game on Saturday.
On the other hand, this style of play does not fit Niko Kovač’s team.
They attempted to employ a similar concept on the wing against RB Leipzig in their game.
Still, they struggled to synchronize the movements and could barely find the player making the run behind the forward-moving defenders throughout the game.
Another factor is that they struggle a lot with finding the vertical passing lanes into the central areas of the field.
Dortmund would rather build through the outside centre-backs of their back-three and have them play towards the wing-backs rather than taking a lot of risk with play through their double pivot.
However, examining what makes Dortmund so dangerous reveals that it has to do with the strength they have shown on the wing and in the half-spaces so far this season.
Unlike Werder, they should not be looking for the second consecutive vertical pass to initiate a deep-deep combination; instead, they need to look for the switch and capitalize on the space they created by pushing their midfielders forward.
They did that well in the first half against RB Leipzig; they always overloaded one side, switched out of it, and then the far-sided wing-back, in this case Yan Couto, dribbled forward until he was attacked by a defender again, pretty much just running past the first line of press.
These types of situations will be the key for Dortmund on Saturday.
I highly doubt that they are good enough to break through the press via their midfield.
They need to identify their own areas to exploit after the first pass, and it will be crucial for them to utilize the width they have with their wing-backs.
Another interesting thing to watch will be how the double-pivot moves after they beat the initial press.
Dortmund haven’t been interested in playing through the central channel at all so far this season.
Their midfielders are moving towards the half-space after they’ve pushed forward a bit too early.
This will enable the types of switches that Dortmund will need to break apart FC Bayern’s defence, and their execution will be a deciding factor in the game.
Conclusion
In the end, we still consider FC Bayern the heavy favourite in this game, even though Borussia Dortmund have been a relatively stable team over the last couple of months.
After the international break, I wouldn’t expect much rotation from either coach, so we will probably see the best eleven of each team on the pitch this Saturday.
For Vincent Kompany and FC Bayern, the key to the game will be their play between the lines.
If they can find space within Borussia Dortmund’s formation, they will likely be able to dominate, as they have against every other opponent this season.
For Borussia Dortmund, I don’t even think the tactical side of things will be the deciding factor.
Yes, they need to be on the lookout for switches and domination in the half-spaces, but in the end, they will need to cope with not seeing a lot of possession and probably allowing a couple of opportunities; they need to show the mental resilience to overcome a stronger opponent.
Der Klassiker could be a very early title decider in favour of FC Bayern in the Bundesliga, making the game a very interesting watch this weekend.
