Der Klassiker
Bayern München against Borussia Dortmund is not Germany's oldest rivalry, or its most local, or its most bitter. It is simply the one that decides things. Here is how it got that way — and why it still stings in Dortmund.
A rivalry with no geography
Most great football rivalries are about proximity. Bayern and Dortmund are 600 kilometres apart, in different halves of the country, with no shared city, no shared stadium and no historic territorial grudge. The Revierderby — Dortmund against Schalke, ten miles up the road — is a far older and angrier fixture.
What Bayern–Dortmund has instead is stakes. For most of the last twenty years, these have been the two clubs capable of winning the league, and the fixture has been where the title actually changed hands. The name "Der Klassiker" is a modern, slightly manufactured import — a nod to Spain's El Clásico — and Dortmund fans in particular have never entirely accepted it. That does not make the games any less enormous.
The 1990s: Dortmund arrive
The foundations were laid when Dortmund became the first club in a long while to genuinely out-perform Bayern. Under Ottmar Hitzfeld they won back-to-back titles in 1995 and 1996 with Matthias Sammer sweeping behind everything, and then went further than Bayern had managed in two decades by winning the Champions League in 1997, beating Juventus in the final.
The pattern that would define the rivalry was already visible: Dortmund built something brilliant, and Bayern responded by hiring the man who built it. Hitzfeld took over at Bayern in 1998.
The 2010s: Klopp, and the machine that answered
This is where the rivalry became what it is now. Jürgen Klopp's Dortmund won the title in 2011 and retained it in 2012 — the second time with a record points haul and a 5-2 demolition of Bayern in the cup final. It was young, ferocious, relentlessly pressing football, and it was beating the richest club in the country with a fraction of the budget.
Bayern's response is the single most important thing to understand about German football in that decade. They did not just improve. They hired Pep Guardiola — and they bought Dortmund's best players.
Wembley, 2013
The peak. An all-German Champions League final at Wembley, Bayern against Dortmund, decided by an Arjen Robben goal in the 89th minute. Bayern won the treble that season under Jupp Heynckes, and it remains the most complete campaign any German club has produced.
It should have been the start of a great two-club era. It was, instead, the end of one.
The transfers that broke it
Mario Götze — Dortmund's homegrown prodigy — was announced as a Bayern player before that final, while Dortmund were still preparing for it. A year later Robert Lewandowski followed him, on a free. Mats Hummels went in 2016.
Whatever you think of the ethics, the effect was clinical. Bayern did not merely beat their closest rival; they dismantled them, absorbed the useful parts, and went on to win eleven consecutive titles from 2013 to 2023 — a streak with no parallel in a major European league. Dortmund spent the rest of the decade as the best of the rest, which is a difficult identity to build a rivalry on.
2023: the day it nearly turned
The rivalry's cruellest afternoon. On the final day of the 2022-23 season, Dortmund needed only to beat Mainz at home to win the title. They went 2-0 down inside a half hour, missed a penalty, and drew 2-2. Bayern won at Köln in stoppage time and took the championship on goal difference.
Dortmund's players sank to the turf in front of a full Westfalenstadion that had come to celebrate. It is one of the most painful things German football has produced, and it is the perfect distillation of the fixture: Dortmund get close, and then Bayern win anyway.
2024: someone else does it
The streak finally ended — and, in a final indignity for Dortmund, it was not them who ended it. Bayer Leverkusen went unbeaten across the entire 2023-24 season to take the title, the first perfect-record-adjacent campaign in Bundesliga history. Dortmund finished fifth, and then reached the Champions League final anyway, because football is not a serious sport.
Why it matters to this game
If you play 34-0-0 for long enough, the reel will eventually hand you 2010s Bayern and Klopp-era Dortmund in the same draft, and you will find yourself building a team out of both. Lewandowski and Hummels moved that way in real life, so there is precedent.
The two squads are among the strongest modern draws in the game — Neuer, Lahm, Robben, Ribéry and Lewandowski on one side; Klopp's young, relentless Dortmund on the other. Landing either is a good day. Landing both is how perfect seasons start. More on which eras are worth spinning for.