Morocco's Amine Adli bringing flair and goals to Bayer Leverkusen's special season

Of one thing we can be almost certain. When Bayer Leverkusen, the magnificent upstarts of this club football season, celebrate their Bundesliga title, there will be a special dance involving Amine Adli and Jeremie Frimpong, two of the more expressive stars of the German club’s dazzling campaign.

Adli, the Morocco winger, and Frimpong, the Dutch full-back, are chief animators of Leverkusen’s flourishing flanks. They are also standout post-goal entertainers and have plenty of opportunity to try out fresh routines. At Leverkusen, the goals keep coming. There’s every prospect the trophies will too in the next month or so.

First up, there’s the German league title, held since 2013 by Bayern Munich but about to be hijacked by a club whose financial resources are dwarfed by Bayern’s and whose reputation, up until now, had been of frailty whenever they have been in sight of the finishing line.

Twice in their history Leverkusen have fluffed the chance of winning the Bundesliga on the season’s last day. Hence the nickname ‘Neverkusen’, one that stuck most stubbornly when, 22 years ago, they stumbled from the top of a table they had led through the spring only in the last two matchdays, ahead of finishing with a silver medal in the same season’s Champions League final and the German Cup, all in the space of a fortnight.

If not Neverkusen, they were simply dubbed ‘Vizekusen’ – ‘Runner-up-kusen’ – derided as perennial chasers, a club without the steel or stamina to see a job through.

Yet, under the transformative coaching of Xabi Alonso, who accepted his first senior managerial post in October 2022 with Leverkusen in the bottom half of Germany’s top division, those defects have been stunningly put in the past. Stamina? They have