Alonso’s remarkable unbeaten run has seen them secure the league with five games to go, prompting the fans to try and immortalise the Spaniard by renaming a road. It was a sea of red outside the stadium as thousands of Leverkusen fans eagerly waited to greet the bus carrying Xabi Alonso and his troops prior to their 5-0 rout over Bremen. According to European reports, an estimated 10,000 fans lined up on Bismarck Street to greet the team’s bus, which fans renamed ‘Xabi Alonso Street’ for the occasion.
This was Leverkusen’s 25th win in 29 games this season, having drawn four games and sitting sixteen points behind second-place Bayern Munich. Leverkusen’s unbeaten run currently sits at 43, matching Juventus’s European record for the longest unbeaten streak of 43 games across 2011 and 2012. The club’s only previous major honours were the 1987/88 UEFA Cup and 1992/93 DFB Cup, and they’ve now snapped Bayern’s 11-season Bundesliga title streak, with a chance of setting a new record by going unbeaten in a German top-flight season.
As mentioned by the Bundesliga website, they are five-time Bundesliga, three-time DFB Cup, and one-time UEFA Champions League runners-up, giving rise to them the unwanted nickname “Neverkusen” and with the reputation of being perennial bridesmaids of German football, all of which has been changed by Alonso’s class of 2023/24.