The treble was always the wrong reference point.
When Bayer Leverkusen finally moved on from Erik ten Hag in late September 2025 — eight matches into the Bundesliga, two points off the relegation places, an entire tactical project visibly stuck in the wrong gearbox — the conversation on German football television fell into the trap nearly every conversation about post-Alonso Leverkusen has fallen into for the last eighteen months. How do you replace what Xabi Alonso did?
You don’t. You stop trying. That, more than any tactical adjustment, is what Kasper Hjulmand has done since his appointment in October.
The Danish corner
Hjulmand’s profile, when he arrived, surprised some Bundesliga reporters who had been expecting a bigger name. He spent five years as Denmark’s national-team coach (2020–2024), reached the Euro 2020 semi-finals with a squad whose tactical identity nobody outside Scandinavia could quite name, and left international football with a reputation for two things: defensive structure that does not collapse, and a rare instinct for keeping a dressing room functional through a long tournament cycle.
Both have been quietly load-bearing at Leverkusen.
The team Ten Hag inherited in summer 2025 had two structural problems Alonso’s departure exposed. The first was that the unbeaten season had been built on possession patterns that required a specific kind of conductor in midfield — Granit Xhaka left for Sunderland in 2024 — and a specific kind of progressive runner from deep, which Florian Wirtz was happy to provide as a number 10 but resisted being asked to provide as a deep-lying playmaker. The second was psychological. The squad had been told for two years that what they were doing was extraordinary. Asked to repeat it, they tightened.
Ten Hag’s response was to ask them to play more directly, more vertically, more like his Manchester United side circa 2022. The pieces did not fit. Wirtz was forced wide, Patrik Schick was being asked to press in a back-three pattern Ten Hag was simultaneously trying to dismantle, and the full-backs — Jeremie Frimpong already gone, his replacement Hugo Ekitiké an inexperienced 22-year-old who had been signed as a forward — were being asked to invert in possession in a way the goalkeeper, Lukáš Hrádecký, did not trust.
By the time Ten Hag was sacked, Leverkusen were 12th, with two wins from eight, and four players had given off-the-record interviews to Bild expressing concern about the direction.
What Hjulmand actually changed
Look at the numbers between Ten Hag’s last match and the most recent international break, and the headline changes are quiet rather than radical:
- Average defensive line dropped from 38.4 metres (highest in the Bundesliga under Ten Hag) to 31.2 metres (15th).
- PPDA — passes allowed per defensive action — rose from 9.1 (5th-most aggressive press) to 13.6 (12th).
- Goals against per match fell from 1.75 to 0.81.
- Possession share dropped from 58.9% to 51.4%.
- Wirtz progressive carries per 90 rose from 4.1 to 6.8.
Read those together and a coherent identity emerges. Hjulmand has stopped asking Leverkusen to dominate matches the way Alonso’s team dominated them, and started asking them to win the matches they should win by being harder to play through.
The press is lower, the line is lower, and the squad is being asked to defend in a 4-2-3-1 mid-block rather than a 3-4-2-1 high block. Wirtz, freed from being the conductor of build-up, has reverted to his most natural role — picking pockets in the half-space, running at retreating back lines, finishing chances he creates for himself. He has 6 goals and 8 assists in the eleven Bundesliga matches since Hjulmand arrived; the goal involvements are higher than during the second half of the unbeaten season.
The squad question
What looked like Ten Hag’s biggest unsolved problem — the depth gap between the unbeaten XI and the bench — Hjulmand has handled by simply selecting from the bench more often. Aleix García, the deep-lying midfielder Bayer brought in from Girona last summer, has gone from a 700-minute reserve to a near-ever-present, partnered with Granit Xhaka’s actual replacement, the academy graduate Noah Mbamba, in a double pivot that almost no neutral fan outside Germany had heard of two months ago.
The two of them together cover ground without overcommitting forward, which is the entire point of a Hjulmand midfield. They are also four years younger, on average, than the Xhaka–Andrich pairing that won the Bundesliga.
What this is not
Hjulmand’s Leverkusen will not finish in the top four. The early-season damage was too severe, and they sit 8th with five matches to go. They will not win another trophy this season; the DFB-Pokal is gone (semi-final defeat to Stuttgart in March) and continental qualification will, at best, be a Conference League play-off place.
What it is — and what makes it tactically interesting in a way Ten Hag’s six weeks were not — is a real reset. Hjulmand was not hired to recreate the unbeaten season. He was hired to build a base from which the next iteration of the project starts in summer 2026.
That iteration is what we’ll be watching most closely. The treble year was a once-in-a-generation moment. The slow rebuild from 12th to mid-table is the harder problem, and the more revealing one. Hjulmand’s first six months suggest he is the right manager to solve it.