Karl Heinz Rummenigge: “We can slowly dust off the championship trophy!”

For Bayern Munich, it was a fantastic match week in the Bundesliga. They further cemented their place at the top of the table with their 2-1 win over SC Freiburg, and RB Leipzig defeated Borussia Dortmund 2-1 at the RedBull Arena to increase Bayern’s gap over their bitter rivals to four points. Marco Rose’s side has been hampered with injuries this season and certainly haven’t benefited at all from Erling Haaland’s absence from the squad through an injury of his own.

Prior to match week 11 kicking off, other than Dortmund, SC Freiburg was positionally the next best team to threaten Bayern, but Julian Nagelsmann’s side passed that difficult test thanks to goals from Leon Goretzka and Robert Lewandowski. The title race, of course, is a marathon and not a sprint, but Bayern winning and Dortmund losing was an implicative signal to the point where Karl-Heinz Rummenigge told Sport Bild: “Dortmund has lost again, now we can slowly dust off the championship trophy.”

Switching managers ahead of the start of the season was always going to be a bit of a gamble from Dortmund’s perspective, but such was the same with Nagelsmann moving from RB Leipzig to Bayern. Dortmund have not been terrible this season by any stretch of the imagination, but they did just suffer their third Bundesliga loss of the season in Leipzig and have faltered twice to Ajax in the Champions League. Rummenigge still feels there’s just a gulf in class between Bayern and Dortmund that’s evident. “I think they’re (BVB) hungry for titles. But it’s always the quality on the pitch, and Bavaria is simply ahead of the game at the moment. And the coach is a great fit for Bavaria too,” Bayern’s former CEO explained.

Photo by INA FASSBENDER/AFP via Getty Images

For Dortmund, it’s not been made any easier that Bayern has already set a record for scoring 40 goals after only 11 match days in the Bundesliga and have taken 28 points from an available 33. From the outside looking in, too, Bayern’s domestic dominance in Germany has the susceptibility to turn outside viewers away from the league for being perceived as a one horse race, or what some refer to as a “farmer’s league.” From Bayern’s standpoint, they can only beat who’s put in front of them and it’s still their job to get results week in and week out, regardless of what their direct competitors, like Dortmund, are doing. “When the same team wins championships every year, it’s not very refreshing, especially for non-Bayern fans. It is still our job to become masters,” Rummenigge said, understanding what the outside perspective of Bayern and the Bundesliga might be.