In the 71st minute at the BayArena two Saturdays ago, with Leverkusen 1-0 up on Stuttgart, Robert Andrich played a flat ball wide to Alejandro Grimaldo on the left touchline. Grimaldo did not cross. He pulled the pass back inside to the edge of the penalty area, where Patrik Schick had peeled off to occupy the gap a centre-back had been forced to vacate when Grimaldo’s first run drew him out. Schick rolled the ball first-time into the path of an arriving runner from deep midfield — Exequiel Palacios on this occasion, though it could have been any of three players — and the chance, eventually, became Leverkusen’s second of the afternoon.
The pattern was Xabi Alonso’s. The personnel, in part, was Alonso’s. The coach was not.
This is the central fact of post-Alonso Leverkusen, eighteen months after the Spaniard left for Real Madrid: a system that was supposed to disappear with its architect has, in modified form, refused to. Hjulmand, the third man to occupy the BayArena dugout in nine months, has spent his tenure not building a Hjulmand team but adjudicating which parts of Alonso’s blueprint the squad will allow him to change and which parts it has, by collective tactical memory, made non-negotiable.
The story is more interesting than the league table suggests.
What Alonso Built
It is necessary, before describing what survives, to be precise about what Alonso constructed between October 2022 and June 2025. The 2023-24 invincible season — 28 wins, 6 draws, no losses, the first Bundesliga title in Leverkusen’s history — was the public artefact. The tactical architecture beneath it had four load-bearing components.
The first was the back three with asymmetric wing-backs. In possession Leverkusen played a 3-4-2-1; out of possession it became, depending on the opponent, a 5-4-1 or a 5-2-3 with the wing-backs dropping to form a back five. Grimaldo on the left and Jeremie Frimpong on the right were not symmetrical players asked to play symmetrical roles. Grimaldo provided width and the deep crossing threat; Frimpong provided vertical penetration and ran beyond defensive lines. The asymmetry was deliberate. It meant the team’s attacking shape was almost never the same on both sides of the pitch, which made it harder to defend in any consistent way.
The second was Granit Xhaka’s deep-lying control. Xhaka, signed from Arsenal in 2023, became the player through whom every meaningful possession sequence ran. His passing range, his acceptance of pressure, and his refusal to play hurried short balls when patience was the better choice were the qualities that gave the structure above him the time to organise.
The third was Florian Wirtz as the central organising principle. Wirtz operated nominally as one of the two attacking-midfielders behind Schick, but the role was more accurately described as a free eight: a player whose remit was to find the empty zones the opposition’s structure had left behind and to receive in them. The team’s attacking shape was, in effect, organised around wherever Wirtz had decided to position himself in any given five-second window.
The fourth was the set-piece operation. Working with the analyst Joaquín Vásquez, Leverkusen produced 24 league goals from set pieces in the unbeaten season — a figure that, in any major European league at any point in the last fifteen years, would have ranked at or near the top of the distribution. The choreography was specific: short corners worked back to a player drifting onto his stronger foot; near-post deliveries with three pre-rehearsed runners; throw-ins in the attacking half treated as full set-piece situations rather than as restarts.
The four components were interdependent. The back three’s asymmetry required Frimpong’s specific profile. Wirtz’s freedom required Xhaka’s deep control. Remove any one component and the others became less effective. In summer 2025, three of the four were removed.
What He Took With Him
Alonso left for Real Madrid in early June 2025. The German coverage treated the move as the loss of the head coach. The deeper loss, in retrospect, was a coaching staff and a recruitment philosophy as much as a single individual. Alonso took with him to Madrid the conditioning coach Iñigo Domínguez, the analyst Sebas Parrilla, and a tactical vocabulary Madrid’s squad has spent the current season trying to learn. The set-piece analyst Vásquez stayed in Leverkusen — a continuity that has, on the visible 2025-26 evidence, mattered more than the broader coverage has noticed.
The squad exodus that followed was the more public story. Florian Wirtz left for Liverpool on June 20 for a base fee of around £100 million plus performance-related add-ons. Jeremie Frimpong followed him to Anfield. Jonathan Tah departed for Bayern Munich on a free transfer that had been signalled the previous winter. Granit Xhaka left for Sunderland in the most surprising of the moves — a £17m fee, a club newly promoted to the Premier League, a 32-year-old midfielder who had become the spine of the Leverkusen project deciding that a new project was worth more than the security of staying. Piero Hincapié joined Arsenal on a season-long loan in late August with a pre-agreed £45m purchase clause that has since been triggered.
Five of the eleven who started the most consequential matches of the unbeaten season were gone before the new campaign began. The recruitment task that fell to sporting director Simon Rolfes — initially under Alonso’s planning, subsequently under three different head coaches — was the largest single-summer rebuild any defending Bundesliga champion has attempted in the post-financial-fair-play era.
The Ten Hag Interregnum
Erik ten Hag was appointed head coach on May 27, 2025, on a contract until 2027. He was sacked on September 1, 2025, after two Bundesliga matches and one DFB-Pokal first-round tie. The final match, a 3-1 home defeat to Werder Bremen, produced the kind of structural incoherence — five in the back, no clear pressing trigger, Wirtz’s replacement role unsolved — that suggested ten Hag and the squad had, in the eight pre-season weeks, not converged on what the team was supposed to be.
The dismissal was the earliest a defending German champion has ever sacked a head coach. The post-mortem, by most accounts that have emerged from inside the club, was less about tactical disagreement than about a perceived inability to resolve the dressing-room transition the summer’s departures had produced. Ten Hag had inherited a squad that had lost its captain (Hradecký’s role had been displaced by the new signing Mark Flekken in goal), its tactical leader (Xhaka), its central creator (Wirtz), and its right-side engine (Frimpong) in the same window. The successor’s task was not to coach Alonso’s team. It was to assemble a different one. Ten Hag, on the available evidence of three matches, had not begun.
Kasper Hjulmand was appointed on September 8, 2025. The Dane’s CV — the Denmark national team through the 2020 European Championship, an earlier and less successful Bundesliga assignment at Mainz a decade prior, the Nordsjælland years before that — read less impressively than ten Hag’s. The fit, by April 2026, has read better.
What Hjulmand Has Reinvented
The most visible structural change Hjulmand has made is also, on closer reading, the most conservative: he has retained the 3-4-2-1. Where ten Hag had attempted, in his three matches, to move Leverkusen toward a more orthodox 4-2-3-1 — the change that the existing squad had visibly resisted — Hjulmand on his arrival announced that the back three would stay. The decision was, by his own pre-match comments in mid-September, made primarily because the squad had been built for it. The Denmark side he had managed at Euro 2020 had played a similar shape. The fit between his preferred system and the inherited squad’s habits was closer than ten Hag’s had been.
Within the 3-4-2-1, the changes have been at the level of detail rather than principle. Hjulmand has adjusted the pressing triggers — Leverkusen now press higher when the opposition centre-back receives with his weaker foot, a refinement Alonso’s team applied less consistently. The wing-back instructions have shifted: Grimaldo retains his deep-cross specialism on the left, but the right-side wing-back role, in Frimpong’s absence, has been redefined as a more orthodox overlapping fullback rather than the inverted runner the Dutchman was. The summer signing Loic Badé from Sevilla has settled into the right centre-back position with the kind of positional discipline that suits a less adventurous wing-back ahead of him.
The double pivot has been reinvented more substantially. Andrich, previously Xhaka’s partner rather than his replacement, has assumed the deeper role with — by the visible passmap evidence of the last three months — a slight shift in his average position toward the left half-space. Palacios, alongside him, plays higher up the pitch than Xhaka’s partners typically did. The change has reduced the team’s ability to control matches through long midfield possession sequences, which was Xhaka’s specialism. It has, in compensation, increased the team’s ability to attack the second phase of opposition build-ups through Palacios’s higher pressing engagements.
The recruitment behind the tactical changes is the part Rolfes deserves the most credit for. Mark Flekken from Brentford solved the goalkeeping question. Jarrell Quansah from Liverpool added depth at centre-back. Ibrahim Maza, an 18-year-old attacking midfielder from Hertha Berlin, was bought as a long-term Wirtz replacement on the principle that an 80% Wirtz at 18 might become a 100% Wirtz at 22. Claudio Echeverri arrived on loan from Manchester City as a short-term creative supplement. Lucas Vázquez signed as a free transfer from Real Madrid — that Leverkusen could land a 34-year-old veteran from the Spanish champions, post-Wirtz, post-Frimpong, post-title, was a quieter institutional victory than the headline fees suggested.
What Survives
The set-piece operation, as noted, has continued. Vásquez’s retention has produced a per-90 set-piece-goal rate in 2025-26 that is, as of late April, within five percent of Alonso’s final-season figure. In a season in which more than half the starting eleven has changed, the continuity is structurally significant: it has provided, on average, one goal in every three matches from a source that is not dependent on the team’s open-play coherence.
The asymmetric attacking shape has survived in modified form. Grimaldo on the left continues to operate as the deep-crossing specialist Alonso designed him into. Schick, now thirty and on a contract running to 2030, continues to function as the back-post target the system was built to feed: thirteen Bundesliga goals by late April, several of them from the same near-post-runner / back-post-arrival pattern that the unbeaten side had drilled to muscle memory.
The set-piece-and-asymmetric-attacking continuity has been enough, in the matches Leverkusen have not had to outplay opponents structurally in open play, to produce points. The team sits, as of this writing, sixth in the Bundesliga — a placement that is, viewed from one angle, a striking regression from the title and, viewed from another, an unusually robust outcome for a side that lost five of its starting eleven and its head coach in the same summer.
The Wirtz Question
The Wirtz absence has been managed, not solved. Maza, the 18-year-old, has played in pieces — 740 league minutes through the season’s first thirty matches, mostly as a substitute, with a goal-and-assist contribution rate that suggests a 2026-27 starter rather than a 2025-26 plug. Echeverri, the loanee, has been used more frequently but less consistently. The team’s progressive-pass numbers from the central attacking-midfield position are, on the visible data, around 70% of Wirtz’s last-season figures.
The deeper question — whether the absence of a player of Wirtz’s specific qualities means the team can no longer be constructed around a central organising principle, and whether it must instead distribute creative responsibility across multiple players — has not yet been answered. Hjulmand’s approach has been to distribute. Whether he will, in summer 2026, attempt to recentralise around a single signing, or continue with the distributed-responsibility model, is the live tactical question of the project’s medium term.
Where Leverkusen Is Now
The Champions League exit in March, 3-1 on aggregate to Arsenal in the round of sixteen, was the result that fixed the season’s external-perception ceiling. Leverkusen had drawn the home leg 1-1 and lost the away leg 2-0 — the kind of two-leg pattern that suggested a side capable of competing with elite opposition for ninety minutes but not for one hundred and eighty. The DFB-Pokal exit at the quarter-final stage to Stuttgart, on a midweek in February, removed the second realistic trophy. The Bundesliga title, on the gap to Bayern, was over by November.
The institutional health, viewed against the rebuild’s scale, is in better condition than the trophyless season suggests. The squad-construction trajectory points toward a 2026-27 side that is, on the visible age-profile evidence, structurally closer to title contention than the present one. The set-piece continuity is real. The Hjulmand-and-Rolfes working relationship, by the few public signs of it, is closer than the ten-Hag-and-Rolfes one was. The academy pipeline, through the Maza signing and the integration of younger squad players, is being protected.
The German football media’s framing of the season as a failure is, in my view, the wrong frame. The right frame is whether a club that has just lost its manager, its captain, its creator, and three other starters can preserve enough institutional identity to remain a top-six Bundesliga side and emerge in eighteen to twenty-four months with a recognisable tactical project. The April-2026 evidence is that it can. The June-2026 transfer window will be the next test. The 2026-27 season will be the conclusive one.
What survives of Alonso’s project is more than the coverage credits, less than the Leverkusen marketing department would prefer to claim, and almost exactly the amount a methodical institutional culture should expect to preserve through a turnover of this magnitude. The system has not been reinvented. It has been negotiated. The squad has let Hjulmand change some things and refused to let him change others. That the squad has views, at all, about what it will and will not become — that the players carry an internalised tactical identity from the Alonso years that constrains their successor’s choices — is itself the evidence that what Alonso built was something more than a system. It was, in the dry sense the word can carry in German football writing, an institution. Institutions outlast their founders. That is the point of having them.