Bayern Munich poised for 10th title in a row but how many is too many?

Even at the moment of Borussia Dortmund’s greatest ecstasy, Hans-Joachim Watzke saw what was coming. It was May 2012 at the Olympiastadion in Berlin and Dortmund were blissfully tearing apart their rivals Bayern Munich 5-2 to seal their first league and cup double.

Robert Lewandowski scored a scintillating hat-trick. Jürgen Klopp got so drunk during the celebrations that he later claimed to have no recollection of them. But their famously pessimistic chief executive was more worried about what might follow. “The echo,” Watzke told his colleagues, “will be dramatic.”

Related: Bayern Munich face uncertain future after exit that wasn’t such a shock | Andy Brassell

A decade on, the echo is still reverberating. Even Watzke could scarcely have foreseen just how accurate his prediction would be. On Saturday, Bayern face Dortmund at the Allianz Arena. Win and they will clinch their 10th consecutive Bundesliga title. No other major European club can match that feat.

Bayern’s humiliation, as it turned out, set off a reaction that would lead to them becoming not only the most dominant side in the history of German football, but one of the most dominant seen in the sport. Their combined margin of victory over the past 10 campaigns has been 137 points.

They have beaten Dortmund in their past seven meetings in all competitions, another record. “Dortmund’s biggest mistake,” Watzke would later admit, “was to irritate FC Bayern too much in 2012.”

For all the impressive feats and imposing numbers Bayern have accumulated over the past decade there is also a cold weirdness to their dominance, the sort of surrealness that arises when conventions have been bent and warped to the extent you are no longer really sure what they mean. On the