Victory tasted sweet in Leipzig on Saturday night. It always does: cough-medicine-sickly-sweet, with a hint of molten gummy bear and factory floor puddle. A first taurine-infused Bundesliga win for die Roten Bullen in their first ever top-flight home match went down especially well, however: it came against super-traditional, mega-authentic behemoths Borussia Dortmund – a club run on ‘true love’ (as the BVB marketing department has it) and supported by principled ultras who preferred to turn out in their thousands for the Black and Yellows’ under-23 fourth division game against Wuppertaler SV (0-0) at the atmospheric, ramshackle ‘Rote Erde’ ground next to the Signal Iduna Park instead.

Much had been said and written about that unofficial boycott. Some thought the lack of support from the die hards was counter-productive as far as Dortmund’s chances at the Red Bull Arena were concerned. Others sarcastically pointed to the futility of the gesture: the away section tickets (and good few more in the home stands) were quickly snapped up by local Dortmund fans eager to see their team in the flesh anyway. ‘The most hated club in Germany‚‘ the newspaper WAZ predicted, would not be hurt by the protest in the slightest: ‘The stadium will be full, Red Bull will continue to invest, Leipzig will continue to play their part.’

In a piece for 11 Freunde, the German football magazine at the vanguard of traditionalism and mullet-adorned nostalgia, Uli Hesse compellingly argued that fans, in Dortmund and elsewhere, don’t need such lectures from the media or football people; they are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves who they like and dislike and how to make their voice heard in a peaceful manner. ‘The supporters’ role is not be told what the role of supporters should be,’ he wrote. There is, in other words, nothing wrong with not turning up at a club whose business model you dislike. Unlike Bayer Leverkusen and Wolfsburg, whose teams have emerged rather organically, RB Leipzig brazenly bought themselves a place in the higher echelons of German football by taking over and rebranding fifth division SSV Markranstädt in 2009. It doesn’t get anymore artificial: the club solely exists as a vehicle for the Red Bull group.

Will other corporations follow suit and circumvent the 50 plus 1 rule restricting direct investment into professional teams by systematically propping up lower league sides in a similar manner? Critics warn of a dystopian future where Germany’s top flight will be contested by Coca-Cola Cottbus, Snickers Offenbach and The Lenovo Lederhosen. But, as Saturday night’s ‘explosion’ (as Süddeutsche Zeitung phrased it) of joy after Naby Keïta’s 89th-minute winner in front of the 43,000 capacity crowd showed, there’s another side to this story: that of the Leipzig supporters. If Hesse is right – and he surely is – than the right for supporters to enjoy their football any way they like must necessarily also apply to those in Saxony.

Leipzig, a former football powerhouse of a city, hasn’t had anything to shout about since VfB Leipzig were relegated in 1994. RB might have been born in sin, in the sports franchise division of Red Bull’s Austrian headquarters, but the club has since unquestionably been adopted, wholeheartedly, by locals proud to have a stake in the first division again. They want Leipzig in the Bundesliga. They want to be in the Bundesliga. Red Bull is only the means to that particular end.

Deep down, this too is about football as an expression of identity and communal pride; a real, genuine sentiment that 11 Freunde and ultras everywhere would undoubtedly approve of – if they were able to look past the wretched name and inglorious ownership structure. ‘One could feel the force of football – even though it came from a can,’ wrote Frankfurter Allgemeine about the impressive home debut of Ralph Hasenhüttl’s men. It is patently acceptable to turn your nose up at the upstarts, to dismiss them as plastics etc etc. Supporters of other RB-owned entities, namely at Salzburg, Leipzig’s feeder team, have valid concerns about the business model. Whether the hate and visceral anger directed at RBL and their supporters is really warranted, however, is a question worth asking.

There is something disturbingly nativist about the backlash, a reactionary ‘us and them’, ‘true and false’ pattern of thought that would be abhorred in other walks of life. Should those unlucky enough to live in a city without a successful big, historic club simply accept their bad fortune? Is the (questionable) purity of the German model really more important than a chance of upward mobility for those born in the wrong town? And why isn’t smart investment, innovation and ambition preferable to the ossification of the status quo? No wonder foreign observers find it very hard to understand why RBL are so despised.

It might take decades for the dislike to wane but RB Leipzig will have become a sizeable force Germany and perhaps beyond long before that. The manner of the 1-0 victory over Dortmund, a tactically-sophisticated battle of wits won without much of the ball by a cast of young, hard-running players, suggested that Europa League qualification at the first time of asking might not be beyond Leipzig’s finest. We’d all better deal with it.

Results: Schalke 0-2 Bayern, Darmstadt 1-0 Frankfurt, Ingolstadt 0-2 Hertha Berlin, Wolfsburg 0-0 Köln, Leverkusen 3-1 Hamburg, Freiburg 3-1 Borussia Mönchengladbach, Leipzig 1-0 Borussia Dortmund, Werder Bremen 1-2 Augsburg 1-2, Mainz 4-4 Hoffenheim.