The BayArena again, and five-nil at home in between
The road to Leverkusen keeps appearing in these rows. The thirty-first of August 2024: away at Bayer 04 Leverkusen, three-two to the visitors — as good a day on the road as these rows hold. The twenty-fifth of January 2025: Leverkusen at home, two-two. The twentieth of December 2025: at home again, one-three, and the fixture finally bit back. The second of May 2026: the BayArena, the ground named in the row, one-four. And the twentieth of September 2026 — four days ago as this is written — the BayArena again: nil-two. Five meetings with one opponent across two years, and the last two at the same ground with the same going-home feeling. Between those two BayArena trips sits the loudest row in this file. The thirteenth of September: Hamburger SV at the Red Bull Arena, five-nil. The ground is named, the scoreline needs no help, and the whole afternoon sits neatly in the middle of two grim rides west. The September rows are the current shape of things, west to east and back. The fifth: away at Werder Bremen, one-three, up in the north-west. The thirteenth: Hamburg at home, five-nil. The twentieth: the BayArena, nil-two. Two long roads west with nothing at the end of them, and one home afternoon with everything at the end of it. Last season ran on the same strange rhythm. The second of May, one-four at the BayArena. The sixteenth of May, one-four away at SC Freiburg — two away days in a fortnight with the same scoreline at the end. But the same rows also hold a three-one away at Eintracht Frankfurt in April and a two-one away at Werder Bremen before it, and at home there were two-nil over SC Freiburg in January and two-one over FC Augsburg in March. The nil-one away at VfB Stuttgart in March belongs with the quiet ones: nothing in it, nothing at the end. Home is where these rows are kindest. The Red Bull Arena appears by name when Hamburger SV come, and the afternoon ends five-nil; the home rows before it hold two-nil over SC Freiburg, two-one over FC Augsburg, a two-two with Borussia Dortmund that even the visitors' file remembers identically, and an earlier two-two with Leverkusen. The one home day that went wrong is the December one with Leverkusen in it: one-three, the same opponent that keeps turning up on the road. By the numbers — Bundesliga: 9th · 4 played · 2-0-2 · 9-5 · 6 pts · form WLWL. All data from ScoreCrowd's match records, retrieved 24 September 2026. The line above is Bundesliga only. The geography of these rows is worth a sentence of its own. Almost every road points west: Bremen in the north-west, Leverkusen and Freiburg in the west and south-west, Frankfurt in the middle of the map, Stuttgart down south. Leipzig sits in the east and the fixture list sends this team across the whole width of Germany and back — the Red Bull Arena rows are the punctuation between long rides. And of the named grounds here, the BayArena appears twice: a fixture that has quietly become the landmark of the file. What comes next is not in the data here yet. The competitions list runs to four entries — the Bundesliga, the DFB-Pokal, the UEFA Champions League and Club Friendlies 3 — so the calendar beyond the league is a bigger map than these rows show. For now the pattern is the thing: go west, come home, regroup at the Red Bull Arena. The five-nil was the regroup, and the loudest sentence in this file.