There is a vague sense of something missing in the otherwise bounteously stocked
Bayern Munich club museum. Opened last year immediately after – and right upstairs from – Bayern's hometown
Champions League final, the museum can absorb a full half-hour of goggling at its stirring display of historical Bayern power before the casual observer finally twigs the basic failure of planning at the heart of its floor design. Along the centre of the main room a series of plinths house the replica trophy haul from successive seasons down the years. At the end of this procession of cups, plates and saucers stands a ceremonial altar roughly where the year 2012 should be. Niftily spotlit, nestled between sponsorial showcases, it is empty, although it takes a moment to realise what was meant to sit here. Call it arrogance. Call it simple curator's optimism. One thing you can't call it is the actual Champions League trophy, which never did make it here in time for the grand opening. It remains, both literally and emotionally, the one slightly jarring absence at the centre of this well-geared footballing super-state.
Indeed, for all the current grace on the pitch and the sense of corporate cohesion off it, Bayern have been champions of Europe once in the past 37 years. With this in mind it is no surprise that inside and outside German football next Saturday's Champions League final at Wembley has become a source of anxiety and fascination. Right now the theme of almost-but-not-quite, of world domination on hold, is never far away from this team.
"When you look at all the pressure we have on us, we won't be influenced by it," Jupp Heynckes, the Bayern manager, says this week, speaking in the swankily upholstered bowels of the Allianz Arena, and returning, as he must still, to last year's disappointment here. "My players have proven they know what to do after such a big disappointment in your own stadium, 90 minutes the better team and
then lose the Champions League final. Then you have a season like this. It's incredible what these lads have done."
Heynckes has no need to talk up his team's achievements: Bundesliga champions by a massive margin, Bayern have also been fearsome at times in Europe, utterly overwhelming in the semi-finals a Barcelona team Heynckes still calls the best in the world. At the same time Thomas Müller was still talking this week about the need to avoid "that loser tag" – even as the rest of Europe cowers a little in the shadow of Bayern's emergence.
It is an often-made mistake to imagine that any newly established sporting supremacy is destined to go on for ever. Yet with Bayern, you do somehow start to wonder a little. Finalists three times in four years, a heavyweight with all the moves, the swagger, the talk, but just missing the actual belt: if they actually go on and win the thing they may just never stop.
Even the Arena, a vast doughnut on the industrial fringes of Munich, seems to throb with the broader historical ascendancy that underpins Bayern's footballing riches. There was plenty of talk of a changing of guard, of one era eliding into another as Bayern swatted Barcelona aside. But from a wider perspective this is simply a continuation of the same era, the concerted rise of Europe's super clubs. Bayern are fourth in football's rich list, with a wealth that feels sustainable, based not in TV rights deals but in a thoroughly embedded corporate partnership arm and a vast domestic merchandising market across an economically booming nation of 81 million people.
This last factor is not to be overlooked. Five years into Europe's economic depression Germany still feels wealthy. There is that forgotten glaze of conspicuous consumption here, a sense of a powerful leisure economy at football's elbow, of infrastructure still being stoked and resources to be spread thickly. The Allianz Arena radiates this sense of boom-time economic scale and inside it Bayern looked an alluringly happy team at training, scampering about puppyishly, calling each other by their full first names ("Jerome!' Philip") – jarring to the nickname-attuned English ear – and taking a very obvious pleasure in their own collective movements.
There were no obvious secrets there, no startlingly state-of-the-art methods in play. Bayern played a small-sided game, then a slightly bigger-sided game, offering evidence that even in training Franck Ribéry dribbles like a man whose feet are coated in some miracle adhesive substance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Müller did not really seem to be doing much, other than popping up now and then to execute some expertly conceived tap-in. A bit later he spent five minutes shooting at the empty goal, a succession of horrible-looking, skinny-legged thwacks, at least half of which fizzed and bobbled and thudded wide of the target. He really is a most unusual, compellingly in-form world-class footballer.
Beyond it all Heynckes stalked the fringes like a tracksuited field marshal, hands clasped behind his back, a 68-year-old who has been linked with a return to Real Madrid but who also suggested he may retire when he leaves Bayern, if only because there is very little elsewhere that could compare right now.
"We are looking forward to Wembley," Henyckes says after training, going on to dwell on his captain, Bastian Schweinsteiger, whom he calls "the best midfielder in the world", but who could also stand as the poster boy for this most almost-but-not-quite generation of grand German talents. Schweinsteiger missed the decisive penalty against Chelsea last year, and for all his pedigree he is yet to win an international title.
"He's a real strategy player," Heynckes says. "He's like the head of the team. He dictates the rhythm of our game. Of course, he is disappointed after the last final but those are situations a football player must cope with. He has worked himself up from then. Players of his generation have this hunger and desire to put the dot over the I."
Endless tribute has been paid in recent weeks to the embedded armature of this rising success, the compulsory system of high-grade academies imposed by the German FA after some dismal performances by the national team at Euro 2000. Müller is a brilliantly realised product of that system. Lounging in the Bayern press theatre in a lime green tie-dye T-shirt, he seems almost laughably relaxed in the basement compound of the club he has been at since the age of 10.
"If you look at the Bundesliga now from a few years ago you have so many young players getting in the team you can see the academy work is paying off," he says. "You don't really need to buy older and foreign players now.
"Having two teams in the Champions League final proves this. Plus when you bring in young players and can also sell them on it means all your finance is reserved for your infrastructure."
It is an emphasis on progressive, self-nourishing corporate methods that has its roots, however distantly, in the club's founding ethos. Created in 1900 as "an open society", Bayern was, from the outset, an aspirational and academically proselytising sporting club, an institution of the educated middle-classes. For a while prospective Bayern players were required to produce a certificate of completed secondary education before they could take the field.
Founded by students, academics and artists, Bayern was known in its early years as Der Kavaliersclub with a membership who "wore straw hats as an outward symbol of extravagance", something echoed in the well-dressed match-day swagger of the modern fan.
Derailed in the middle of the last century by the vicissitudes of Nazi Germany, which effectively dismantled the club's part-Jewish administration, Bayern's supremacy was some time in the making. Membership of the inaugural Bundesliga in 1963 was handed instead to 1860 Munich, although this was perhaps the making of Bayern. Forced to trawl the Bavarian regions for young players, Bayern produced their first great team of Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Müller and Sepp Maier. By 1974 the club housed one of the most gilded sets of players of all time: six Bayern Munich players ended that year with World Cup, European Cup and Bundesliga medals.
It is a legacy that endures into the modern-day set-up, greats from the past layered within the current administration, from Gerd Müller's role as a coach of the reserve team, up to Uli Hoeness, the club president. At times it is even possible to detect something a little oppressive in this. Whereas last year Chelsea were playing simply for Chelsea, a self-contained guerilla outfit, Bayern must carry not just the hopes of a team, but of an entire system and beyond that a trophy-hungry nation.
This season Germany may have circumvented the issue of choking in finals in the manner of a true economic giant – by wiping out the competition first – but beyond this much is still expected. The final question at Bayern's press marathon was a meta-question: a question about the questions. Was it hard to bear, the sense of a world in thrall to your own emergent super-club?
"It's a sign that the final is in front of us," Thomas Müller said with a glint of something that suggests Bayern, who have not lost in four matches against Dortmund this year, may just be about to put the seal on things. "It took me a bit longer to get in here in the car. But it's cool. I don't have a problem with it. We have to show football to the world, don't we?"
