‘All I want in life’s a little bit of love to take the pain away,” sang Jason Pierce in the opening line of Spiritualized’s 1997 opus Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. And just a little bit has always been all Wolfsburg have been likely to get. One of a couple of special cases in the Bundesliga, a factory team derided by fans of other clubs for their lack of ‘realness’, with their matchups with Bayer Leverkusen only spared the previous epithet of ‘El Plastico’ in recent years due to Hoffenheim and RB Leipzig joining the elite on a quasi-permanent basis.
And here they are now floating in space, neither the most hated team by opposing teams’ ultras who consider them inauthentic (that would be either of the two above) nor the best funded by a corporate (that would be Leipzig). Rampantly successful over the last few years, Leverkusen are more comfortable in their own skin and have the wit to lean into how they have commonly been perceived; their club shop sells T-shirts with the legend ‘keine tradition seit 1904’.
