Who will win the Bundesliga title in 2024-25 and who will be scrapping for survival? We look at all the key questions with our German Bundesliga 2024-25 season predictions via the trusty Opta supercomputer.
Bundesliga 2024-25 Predictions: The Quick Hits
Favourites for the Title: Bayer Leverkusen to defend their crown.
Champions League Favourites: Bayer Leverkusen, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, RB Leipzig.
Relegation Favourites: Bochum, Holstein Kiel, St. Pauli.
With one team dominating the league, setting multiple records en route to clinching the title with several weeks to spare, the 2023-24 Bundesliga season was business as usu… Wait, hang on a minute!
While there was one side miles ahead of everyone else, this time it was Bayer Leverkusen. Xabi Alonso’s side won their first ever Bundesliga title last term, ending Bayern Munich’s run of 11 league triumphs in a row in the process. Leverkusen not only won the title but also became the first team in the competition’s history to manage an unbeaten season.
Can they deal with the added pressure of being the side everyone now wants to beat? Will Bayern roar back to reclaim the title? Or could somebody else make a title charge?
Behind them, who is most likely to qualify for the Champions League, and who will have to worry about getting relegated?
We asked the Opta supercomputer to simulate the 2024-25 Bundesliga season 10,000 times to find the answers to those questions and a whole lot more.
Who Will Win the Bundesliga in 2024-25?
Rejoice Bayer Leverkusen fans. In almost half of the Opta supercomputer’s simulations (49.2%) the team until recently nicknamed ‘Neverkusen’ by many managed to retain the Bundesliga title; a feat that only four sides have achieved in history (Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Borussia Mönchengladbach and Hamburger SV).
The model has confidence in a Leverkusen side that has seen no major departures so far this summer. The club’s most notable piece of business was convincing Alonso to stay at the club, despite the Spaniard surely topping the list of every elite club that had been on the hunt for a new coach.
Alonso, who has been in charge of Leverkusen since October 2022, boasts the third-best points-per-game ratio (2.25) of all managers in Bundesliga history, behind only Pep Guardiola (2.52) and Hansi Flick (2.45).
Alonso was probably also the candidate Bayern Munich most wanted to become their new head coach for the 2024-25 season. After a lengthy search they decided to appoint Vincent Kompany from Burnley. In 21.7% of simulations, Bayern and their Belgian boss manage to regain the title that seemed to have become guaranteed for them until last season.
Kompany is not Bayern’s only import from English football, with the German record champions also signing João Palhinha (Fulham) and Michael Olise (Crystal Palace), who the club hope will have an impact similar to that of Harry Kane last season.
England’s record scorer had a superb first Bundesliga campaign on a personal level, finishing as the league’s top scorer on 36 goals, which was also the most scored by any player in their first season in the competition.
Like Bayern, Borussia Dortmund also enter the season with a relatively inexperienced coach at the helm in club legend Nuri Sahin. Still, in 12.6% of supercomputer simulations the 35-year-old guided BVB to top spot.
While Dortmund managed to impress in Europe in 2023-24, reaching the Champions League final, their domestic form was underwhelming and they suffered their first finish outside the top four since the departure of Jürgen Klopp in 2015.
With the signings of Pascal Groß, Serhou Guirassy, Waldemar Anton, Yan Couto and Maximilian Beier, Dortmund are looking to play a role in the fight for the Bundesliga title again.
RB Leipzig are given the fourth-best odds to win the Bundesliga (11.9%).
Despite losing Dani Olmo to Barcelona, the Saxons still boast some of the league’s most exciting attackers. Loïs Openda bagged 24 goals last season as he finished as the league’s third-top scorer; Benjamin Sesko – the subject of a lot of Premier League interest over the summer – has found the net in each of his last seven Bundesliga appearances; and Xavi Simons will be on the books again after another year-long loan from PSG.
Even with Olmo gone, Marco Rose’s side are the ones from the chasing pack of Bayern, Leipzig, Dortmund and Stuttgart, that have had the smallest turnover in terms of personnel during the summer.
Last season’s runners-up VfB Stuttgart have lost some key players in Guirassy, Anton (both to Dortmund) and Hiroki Ito (Bayern), which might explain their title odds being just 4.6%. Considering where Stuttgart have come from – they only survived relegation via the play-offs in 2022-23 – that’s still a considerable turnaround in fortune for the club whose last Bundesliga title came in 2006-07.
Who Will Qualify for the Champions League?
Naturally, the five teams with the best title odds are also the five sides who have the best chance at qualifying for the Champions League according to the supercomputer.
Leverkusen head into their second consecutive Champions League campaign in 96% of simulations while Stuttgart have the slimmest odds among the top five teams to qualify for Europe’s premier competition, but still make it in more than half of the supercomputer’s calculations (53.1%). That would see them qualify for consecutive Champions League campaigns for the first time in the club’s history.
Only in 7.5% of the simulations did any of the other 13 teams in the Bundesliga end the season in a Champions League spot.
This reflects the big gap between the top five teams and the rest, something we already saw in 2023-24: no fifth-placed team has ever managed to collect more points in the three points-per-win era than Dortmund’s 63 last campaign (same as Leverkusen in 2019-20), while Eintracht Frankfurt had the joint-lowest points total of a side to finish as high as sixth (or better) in that period with 47 points (same as Nürnberg in 2010-11).
Frankfurt are given the best odds among the teams from outside last year’s top five to qualify for the Champions League, with the 2022 Europa League winners ending 2.0% of season simulations in a UCL spot.
As the defending Europa League champions, Frankfurt featured in the Champions League in 2022-23, but have not qualified via a domestic competition for Europe’s biggest club competition since becoming German champions in 1959 and reaching the European Cup final in the subsequent year.
TSG Hoffenheim’s top scorer Maximilian Beier (16) has joined Dortmund, but they can still rely on veteran Andrej Kramaric, who has registered more goal involvements in the Bundesliga since the start of April than any other player (12).
Hoffenheim have also just signed Adam Hlozek, but still need to steady their shaky defence – they both scored and conceded 66 goals last term. Will this be enough for Pellegrino Matarazzo to become the second coach after Julian Nagelsmann to lead Hoffenheim to the Champions League? Our supercomputer gives that scenario a 1.4% chance.
Since Bo Henriksen took charge in February, only Leverkusen (35), Stuttgart (30) and Leipzig (28) have picked up more points in the Bundesliga than Mainz 05 (23). In the “Henriksen Table” Mainz are strong contenders for a Champions League spot, but their chances of qualifying for the UCL in our supercomputer’s projections are somewhat slimmer: 1.2% of its simulations see Mainz qualify for the Champions League for the first time in the club’s history.
Freiburg came close to qualifying for Champions League football on multiple occasions during Christian Streich’s 12-year reign. The legendary coach has now departed the club and has been replaced by his former player Julian Schuster, who will be only the fifth coach to take charge of Freiburg in the Bundesliga in what will be their 25th Bundesliga season. In 1.2% of simulations Schuster pulls off a feat neither of his predecessors have managed – leading Freiburg into the Champions League.
The good news for fans of all other teams is that there is no reason to give up hope: all of the 18 Bundesliga sides finished in a UCL spot at least once in the Opta supercomputer’s simulations, with even newcomers Holstein Kiel qualifying for the Champions League in one of our 10,000 sims.
Who Will be Relegated from the Bundesliga in 2024-25?
Last season saw former Bundesliga giants FC Köln get relegated, with Darmstadt 98 the other team to go down. Coming the other way are FC St. Pauli and Bundesliga debutants Holstein Kiel, who will also be the first representatives of the state of Schleswig-Holstein in the German top-flight.
VfL Bochum finished 16th in the Bundesliga last season and, after a 3-0 home defeat to Fortuna Düsseldorf in the first leg of the relegation play-offs, looked guaranteed to go down. Bochum, however, managed a sensational turnaround and secured their Bundesliga status via a penalty shootout after a 3-0 victory in the return leg.
In 13% of simulations Bochum will be consigned to the play-offs again, and in 36.8% of them they will leave the league directly, making them the favourites for relegation. Crashing out in the first round of the DFB-Pokal will certainly not have helped their odds.
Bundesliga debutants Holstein Kiel went down directly in 35.6% of simulations and finished in the play-off spot in 13%. The “Störche” (Storks) can draw hope from the following fact: none of the last four Bundesliga debutants went down in their first top-flight season, in fact three of them, Leipzig, Union Berlin and Heidenheim, are still in the league (Ingolstadt are currently in the third tier).
The 2. Bundesliga season in 2023-24 saw St. Pauli finish above their intercity rivals Hamburger SV for the first time since the start of the Bundesliga in 1963 and 2024-25 will be the first campaign in that period that St. Pauli will play in a division above HSV.
They’ve lost head coach Fabian Hürzeler to Brighton but Alexander Blessin has arrived from Belgian side Union Saint-Gilloise. At 33.5%, St. Pauli have the third-highest chance of getting directly relegated, while 13% of the simulations see them finishing in the play-off spot – maybe setting up a tasty clash with Hamburg?
FC Augsburg first played in the Bundesliga in 2011-12 and it has become a recurring joke that each year they are everyone’s pre-season favourites to go down, but never do. In fact, they’ve not even had to play in the relegation play-offs.
The Opta supercomputer does not see Augsburg as one of the three sides with the biggest odds of getting relegated, unlike every member of every Bundesliga prediction game you are a part of.
There are another four teams (Union, Gladbach, Wolfsburg and Heidenheim), that were directly relegated in more than 10% of the simulations. However, no side bar the top five can be too sure about their Bundesliga status: none of the top five teams finished in the bottom two in any of the simulations, this was the case in at least 3% of the simulations for each of the other 13 clubs.
Opta-Simulated Bundesliga 2024-25 Table
After simulating the 2024-25 season 10,000 times, we’re able to average the points total of every club across those simulations and therefore rank teams positionally. Here’s the Opta supercomputer results from those simulations:
1st: Bayer Leverkusen – 72.6 average points
2nd: Bayern Munich – 68.3
3rd: Borussia Dortmund – 65.7
4th: RB Leipzig – 65.6
5th: Stuttgart – 61.2
6th: Eintracht Frankfurt – 45.6
7th: Hoffenheim – 44.2
8th: Mainz 05 – 43.8
9th: Freiburg – 43.7
10th: Werder Bremen – 41.8
11th: Heidenheim – 40.0
12th: Wolfsburg – 39.7
13th: Borussia Mönchengladbach – 39.6
14th: Union Berlin – 38.2
15th: Augsburg – 36.8
16th: St. Pauli – 34.3
17th: Holstein Kiel – 34.0
18th: Bochum – 33.8
How Does the Opta Supercomputer Model Work?
• Opta’s League Prediction model estimates the likelihood of teams finishing in each position in the competition. We can therefore see how successful a team’s season is likely to be, whether it’s their relegation or title chances.
• The model estimates the probability of each match outcome (win, draw or loss) by using betting market odds and Opta Power Rankings. The odds and rankings are based on historical and recent team performances.
• The model considers the strength of opponents by using these match outcome probabilities and simulates the remaining fixtures in the competition thousands of times. By analysing the outcome of each of these simulations, the model can see how often teams finished in each league position to create our final predictions.
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