Bayern Continue With The Touching Trend. Kinda.

By: chris | May 15th, 2008

It’s been a touching week with the news that Oliver Kapo handed a boot boy the keys to a Mercedes because he didn’t have a pair of shoes for him to take home, and Olof Mellberg having 3200 Aston Villa shirts custom made for the travelling fans to his final AV game before leaving for the northwest corner of Italy. Continuing along this line, Bayern Munich agreed to play a friendly with 5th division side Darmstadt yesterday in an attempt to help them avoid bankruptcy. Nice, right? Sure. At least it was until they put 11 goals past them.

Who does that?

The game ended 11-5, which means Darmstadt may have been able to make a game of it with Zenit today, seeing as how they only managed to put 4 past Bayern, unlike a 5th division side.

Of course, given that this is a 5th division German side seriously struggling financially, you could probably make the argument Luca Toni damn well coulda woulda shoulda put 25 past Darmstadt all by his lonesome. So maybe 11 isn’t all that bad. But they couldn’t have just made it close? Eight would’ve been sufficient.

Hero, or villain, depending on how you look at it, was Jan Schauldraff, who scored 7 goals. One more and he would’ve had as many tallies as he did appearances for Bayern this season. I suppose that’s a not too subtle way of saying “Hey! Look at me! I can play!”. Let’s just hope he sent sympathy cards out to the Darmstadt players after the match. (Think he’ll be sending out highlights of this one when he’s looking for a new employer this summer?)

Next up for Duisberg is Bayer Leverkusen, who will also be doing their part to help out the minnows. The funny part of all this is that you’d think Darmstadt have a long and storied history making them a romantic side fallen on hard times. Not the case at all. They’ve only managed two season in the top flight – and that was over 25 years ago. So this one’s truly for the little people.

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Category: Bundesliga

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Jan

Sort of. The two teams met officially in a cup match. The income this match generated helped St. Pauli's financial situation a lot.
-nickt.-

didn't bayern do this for st. pauli a while back as well?
chris

I'm just poking fun at Bayern. I don't doubt they couldn't help but score 11 goals, but it is funny when you think about it topically - come to the rescue then put up a double digit scoreline.
ben

I used to go through something similar when I would fire up FIFA or Winning 11, choose an insane club like ManU or the Brazillian national team, then play a friendly against some 3rd division loser. There was no challenge whatsoever, but I did enjoy scoring a goal every 20 seconds.
Jan

You don't need to have played in the Bundesliga all the time to have some tradition or a name. Though, Bayern were actually saving two clubs. They were supposed to help SSV Ulm as well, who couldn't organise a match in time, so the two clubs decided to split the wealth. Darmstadt keeps the money from the match tickets they sold and Ulm gets the money from the TV broadcast. This way Bayern saved the ass of two clubs with one game, while scoring enough goals for both clubs. And I don't see a problem with Bayern running up the scoreline. While the small clubs get the money, the people really mostly paid to see Bayern play and get an autograph by Luca Toni or Franck Ribery.