Freiburg top the Bundesliga after a record start: should bettors believe in the surprise leaders?

Advertisement

When the bookmakers priced up the 2026/27 Bundesliga title race in August, SC Freiburg were 250/1, behind even Hoffenheim and Eintracht Frankfurt. Five matchdays later, Julian Schuster's side sit top of the table.

Thirteen points from five games is a club record, and the four goals they have conceded is the joint-best defensive return in the league. It is also their second spell at the top this season, although, as Bundesliga.com points out, Freiburg have never successfully defended first place.

So is this a side the market badly underrated, or a hot streak against a kind run of fixtures? The next eight days should go a long way to answering that.

Five games, 13 points: how Freiburg built a record start

Freiburg opened with a 4-1 win over Werder Bremen, Yuito Suzuki helping himself to a hat-trick, before edging past promoted Paderborn 1-0 away from home. Borussia Mönchengladbach were then swept aside 5-0 at the Europa-Park Stadion, with Yannik Engelhardt and Igor Matanović scoring twice each and Maximilian Eggestein adding the fifth. Gladbach sacked Eugen Polanski the following day.

The only dropped points came in Frankfurt, where Freiburg twice came from behind to draw 2-2. Then came Schalke on Matchday 5. Eggestein scored early, Schalke levelled before the break and Suzuki was sent off for a second yellow card on the hour. With ten men, Freiburg looked set for a frustrating afternoon until substitutes Keisuke Gotō and Vincenzo Grifo combined late on, Gotō heading in Grifo's cross to win it.

"The boys took it in their stride and saw it through despite being a man down," Schuster said afterwards.

The numbers behind the noise: why this is not just luck

The obvious question with any early-season leader is whether the results match the performances. In Freiburg's case, so far, they largely do.

After four matchdays, data cited by Goal.com had Freiburg on 9.3 expected goals, the third-highest figure in the league, while allowing just 3.7, the joint second-best. Goalkeeper Mio Backhaus was making only 1.5 saves per 90 minutes, compared with 5.3 for Augsburg's keeper. Freiburg are not winning because their goalkeeper is standing on his head; they are winning because opponents rarely get a sight of goal.

There is continuity, too. Schuster is in his third season since succeeding Christian Streich and finished fifth in his first. Last term he took Freiburg to the DFB-Pokal semi-finals and the Europa League final, which they lost 3-0 to Aston Villa in May, so this is a squad used to playing twice a week.

Summer departures for Johan Manzambi (Aston Villa) and Merlin Röhl (Everton) could have stalled that progress. Instead, new arrivals Engelhardt and Gotō have already scored decisive goals.

Schuster, for his part, refuses to get carried away. "If we were in this position on matchday 32, you'd hear something else from me," he said in September.

A kind fixture list and a familiar story

Now for the case for caution. Three of Freiburg's five league opponents, Gladbach, Paderborn and Schalke, are the three sides the StatsUltra simulation model currently rates as the likeliest to be relegated, at 65%, 61% and 29% respectively. Schalke managed a single shot on target in Freiburg's last outing and still took the leaders into the closing minutes.

History is not especially encouraging either. Freiburg led the table after Matchday 5 in 2022/23, lost top spot to Union Berlin a week later and finished fifth. Union themselves led for around seven weeks that season before finishing fourth. Hoffenheim went into the 2008/09 winter break top of the league as a promoted side and ended up seventh. The famous exceptions, Kaiserslautern in 1997/98 and Wolfsburg in 2008/09, were built over a full season under Otto Rehhagel and Felix Magath, not in five games.

Squad depth will be tested as well. The Conference League campaign includes a trip to Monaco, and Suzuki, Freiburg's top scorer with four league goals, is suspended for the visit to Leverkusen.

Leverkusen away, Bayern at home: the real examination

Sunday's trip to the BayArena (15:30 CEST) is Freiburg's toughest assignment yet. They are winless in seven meetings with Leverkusen, and their last win there, 3-2 in September 2022 under Streich, briefly sent them top of the table. That is a neat bit of symmetry, if nothing else.

Carles Martínez's side have taken 10 points from 12 since losing at Elversberg on the opening day and have scored in 17 consecutive Bundesliga matches. Patrik Schick has found the net on each of the first five matchdays, something only Dimitar Berbatov (2005/06) and Stefan Kießling (2009/10) had managed for Leverkusen before him.

The bookmakers lean towards the home side, with Leverkusen 3/4, the draw 33/10 and Freiburg 10/3. After that comes the Conference League trip to Monaco, then the reigning champions Bayern Munich at the Europa-Park Stadion on Matchday 7.

Put simply, the market thinks Freiburg are a good team, not a title team. These two league games are where we find out whether it is right.

From 250/1 to top of the table: what the odds now say

Freiburg's title price tells an interesting story, mainly because it has barely moved. They were 250/1 in early August and 175/1 with FanDuel at the end of that month. By late September, DraftKings had them at 150/1, while Bayern remain around 1/8. Nobody in the betting industry seriously expects the champions to collapse, and Freiburg's 16/1 in the "without Bayern" market is a more honest reflection of where they stand.

The real movement has come in the race for the top four. FanDuel offered 12/1 on Freiburg finishing in the Champions League places in late August, which implied a chance of around 8%. StatsUltra's model now makes it 40%, with an 83% chance of some form of European football and less than 1% for the title. If there was value in Freiburg this season, it sat in the top-four market in August, and most of it has since been priced in.

It also pays to know what you are comparing when you shop around for a price. Many bookmakers share an owner and an odds feed, and SisterBets maps which brands belong to the same network, so you can tell a genuinely different price from the same one in new colours.

The verdict: believe the team, be careful with the price

Freiburg are a well-run club with the numbers to back up their results, and a first-ever Champions League qualification is a realistic target. But five games, mostly against weaker sides, is a small sample, and the shorter prices already reflect much of that optimism.

Any long-odds bet on a surprise leader is best treated as part of the fun of the season rather than a plan, and the tools covered in this guide on Responsible Gambling for Online Casino Players, from deposit limits to cool-off periods, apply just as much to a weekend bet on the Bundesliga.

The next eight days will tell us more about Freiburg than the first five matchdays did.