Bundesliga Champions League Preview | Bayer  04 Leverkusen | OneFootball

In the third Champions-League related feature involving a Bundesliga club here on Get German Football News, we’ll be checking in on Bayer 04 Leverkusen. Bayern and Dortmund have had their days. Now comes the turn for Germany’s red company team. Newly appointed Leverkusen trainer Kasper Hjulmand heads straight back home to Copenhagen to see if he can replicate his success in the Bundesliga on Europe football’s grandest stage.

We’ll be going into rather significant depth when comes to discussing Hjulmand’s Bundesliga debut. No one could have predicted that so much would change at die Werkself since our last check-up. Erik ten Hag got the axe despite presiding over one win, one loss, and one draw in his short three-match tenure. Hjulmand has already turned the team around so rapidly that some German footballing pundits are talking title aspirations again.

Exaggeration?

Of course.

Let’s dive in.

Bayer 04 Leverkusen UCL Squad

The release of Leverkusen’s UCL roster likely leaves anyone attempting to follow what’s been going on with this team still more perplexed. One has barely had a chance to get accustomed to most of the new names that arrived during training camp, let alone all the players that came in near the transfer deadline. The German club itself – in part due to UEFA rules mandating the selection of local players – had to call upon many unknown names from their youth academy.

This is the reason for the exclusion of both Jonas Hofmann and Martin Terrier; a pair of players one would have certainly thought die Werkself would have wanted to include. In Hofmann’s case, it’s really getting continually worse for the once exalted German international. Exequiel Palacios’ injury accorded Leverkusen the opportunity to call Hofmann (currently struggling with injury) back up.

What ended up happening? The club went for Jeanuël Belocian. Hofmann finds himself ignored by three successive head coaches in three months. Ouch. Perhaps reporting on that piece of news proved easier and more hard-hearted than trying to figure out who some of these totally unheard of ones are. The author will at least give it a crack below.

Defenders:

Quansah, Badé, Tapsoba, Arthur, Tape, Grimaldo, Vázquez, Hawighorst, Pohl

Midfielders:

Fernández, Andrich, Tillman, Ben Seghir, García, Belocian, Jeremiah Mensah, Maza, Buono, Culbreath, Naba Mensah

Forwards:

Echeverri, Schick, Poku, Tella, Kofane, Izekor

Ken Izekor, Jeremiah Mensah, Naba Mensah, Ben Hawighorst, Francisco Buono, Ferdinand Pohl, and Montrell Culbreath all play for the Leverkusen U19s. The reason for this is that the Westphalians dissolved their official reserve team some 11 years ago. The club is content with carrying a strong U17 and U19 team whilst the exceptionally strong Latin American scouting network always brings in new talent from across the pond.

As the 2023/24 run to “triple final” in the Bundesliga, DFB Pokal, and Europa League demonstrates, there’s often nothing wrong with this approach. In such a season, however, the lack of developed players with experience at a high level may come back to haunt them. Even by Leverkusen standards (always a bunch of U19s in the squad) seven U19 professionals is pretty damn high.

Bayer 04 Leverkusen UCL Schedule

The full European schedule for these Westphalians actually constitutes quite a rocky path. Much of the praise Hjulmand has garnered for his first league win remains fairly irrelevant in light of the tough tasks ahead. Envisioning this team punching through to the knockouts obviously isn’t impossible as gets a little easier to pick up points after the turn of the calendar year. Moreover, the Bundesliga’s random scheduling program has been rather kind to Leverkusen for the duration of 2025.

Thursday, September 17th

FC Copenhagen (A) 18:45

Wednesday, October 1st

Athletic Bilbao FC (H) 21:00

Tuesday, October 21st

PSG (H) 21:00

Wednesday, November 5th

SL Benfica (A) 21:00

Tuesday, November 25th

Manchester City (A) 21:00

Wednesday, December 10th

Sporting Lisbon (H) 18:45

Tuesday, January 20th

Olympiakos (H) 21:00

Wednesday, January 28th

Villareal (H) 21:00

Hjulmand can likely afford to rotate out some of his stronger professionals against weaker league opponents in September and October. Note that expecting a newly installed trainer tasked with proving himself in the Bundesliga following a 10-year-absence to do so counts as highly unlikely. Hjulmand’s chief task remains solidifying the XI so as to stabilize them in league play. If B04 find themselves in the lower half of the league table come Christmas, a solid European campaign probably doesn’t count for much in the minds of the club managers.

Tactics Check, Bayer 04 Leverkusen

Since our last detailed check in with Germany’s red company team…..ah hell with it. What hasn’t happened with this team? Seriously. It’s been a bloody massacre under the Bayer Cross. RB Leipzig fans participated in a “restart button” choreo. B04 supporters might as well throw up a “reboot banner”. Simon Rolfes and the Leverkusen administrative staff treated Erik ten Hag like fully faulty operating system. Turn the computer off and wipe all the data.

Phrew. What on earth does one do with a totally new team that – thanks to endless more insanity near the end of the transfer window – now features plenty of new faces that even the diehard fans of this club can’t recognize!?! Even the NordKurve probably can’t name half the starting players on their own team!! Something like this might be understandable in the context of relegation, but this is a CHAMPIONS LEAGUE SIDE!!

It is all a bit much. Perhaps we’ll simply have to take a page from Rolfes’ playbook and simply wipe the slate clean. Anything and everything that took place under ten Hag can be considered null and void. We’ll skip over the first two Bundesliga fixtures entirely and go straight to last Friday’s league victory over Eintracht Frankfurt.

Lineup—Leverkusen—Match Three

Extremely basic stuff from start to finish. The new trainer obviously had no time to tell his new team to do anything other than “do what worked for you before”. Squinting hard to find some accent marks from Hjulmand isn’t easy. One could credit the Dane for returning die Werkself to a 3-4-3 formation and making Loic Badé the new central pivot, but it was actually ten Hag’s Rogier Meijer who set this in motion during a friendly over the international break.

If Hjulmand had a few words for his new defensive captain, it’s more than fair to say that they were the right ones. Badé turned in an absolutely beastly performance, winning nearly 90 percent of both his air and ground duels. Badé and Jarell Quansah made their contributions to the attack as well. Edmond Tapsoba was also brilliant on what is generally considered to be his weaker slant side.

Lucas Vasquez has to work in what looked like a total of three different tactical positions: As a right wingback, a central midfielder after Robert Andrich’s sending off, and an attacking midfielder during a late push near the end. Major plaudits to the 34-year-old for a banging Bundesliga debut. Again, however, one should note that Meijer helped get him off the mark during the international break’s test fixture.

Malik Tillman performed much better in his second Bundesliga start even if the USMNT international didn’t get his name on the scoresheet this time. Nathan Tella pushed double set-piece scorer Alejandro Grimaldo for the man-of-the-match honors and pretty much everyone else apart from the two ejected players (Andrich and Ezequiel Fernandez) had a great game.

As Germans are fond of saying, “neue Besen kehren gut” (“new brooms sweep well”). Sometimes everything just clicks under a new coach. Note that this author has used that phrase in reference to plenty of new head-coaches who promptly fell directly on their faces not long afterwards. If memory serves correctly, the phrase once applied to the likes of (among others) Tayfun Korkut and Heiko Herrlich.

Yeeeouch.

Thursday tip:

Copenhagen 3, Leverkusen 1

Ahem. One swift fell swoop of the broom and now it’s time to take a closer look at the floor. Ready to find those left-behind dust-mites? That’s the bold prediction for Thursday’s early kickoff at the Parken. The author’s intuition actually doesn’t have much to do with Nathan Tella’s injury as Ibrahim Maza can fill in just fine. Aleix Garcia can also replace the injured Exequiel Palacios.

One merely has the sense that Copenhagen head coach Jacob Neestrup has done his homework in this case. Neestrup knows more than a little something about his footballing colleagues down south. That’s probably the reason the Dane opted not to take a Bundesliga job this past summer. To that one can add the fact that it almost seems physiologically impossible for most of the star players from last Friday’s match to replicate their performances again.

It just might be time for a little reality check.

GGFN | Peter Weis