The winter break is now upon us!

There shall be no more competitive FC Bayern games to devour, digest, and regurgitate due to alcohol over-consumption and/or over-excitedness (if you're a canine), for the next 3 weeks at the time of this writing. However, one thing of note is that this nearly month long competitive break is not really seen in many of the other top leagues around Europe. My immediate question was:

Does break actually cause a difference in play between the first 2 halves of the season? Followed by,

Do teams tend to perform better, worse after this break? and,

Does this benefit teams at the bottom of the table more that others? And,

Why am I asking all these questions without answering a single one? Just pick one!

So, lets start this with league leaders. As FC Bayern Munchen are the current Bundesliga leaders after an incredible run of form to start the season, I asked myself the following:

How do the league leaders at the Winter Break fare in post-Winter Break play in the Bundesliga? How should we expect FC Bayern to do in 2013?

Wait, that wasn't even one of my original questions and its was even 2 questions! Forget it, full steam ahead! Those words can never be wrong unless you're the captain of the Titanic, which I am not.

To answer this I looked back at the league leaders at the 17 game mark over every complete Bundesliga season since 2000/2001, since that seemed like a good enough spot from which to establish an arbitary time period to measure.

Below I present the table of my findings showing the first and second half performance for the Bundesliga league leader at the midpoint, along with there final point total and final place in the season.

As can be seen, the Bundesliga league leader (BuLL) at the winter break mark has earned on average 38 points by the winter break. In addition, the average BuLL post-winter break goes approximately 9-4-4 in a conservative estimate. In a liberal estimate, this create a small discrepancy between the calculated second half points average of 33 and the calculated average of 32. This one point I'm not going to fret over right now, since I want to look at the big picture, so we'll assume 9-4-4 for the time being.

With the winter break, looking at the differences, we can see that the average league leader wins 2 less games in the 2nd half of the season and draws one more and loses one more compared to the pre-winter break period.

In looking at FC Bayern for the 2012-2013 season we can postulate that they should conservatively finish with 73 points, or the same as last year. However, is this good enough to win the Bundesliga title?

As shown, the BuLL at season's end on average finishes with 73 points or the exact amount of points FC Bayern is predicted to earn under these assumptions. Hooray! New reason to drink more excessively at New Years!

What are your thoughts? Can FC Bayern win the Bundesliga this season with the predicted 73 points? Will they earn more than 73 points? Are they the most badass group this side of the Bowery Boys in history? Do you want to have Thomas Muller's babies? Let me know your thoughts