In days gone by, Bayern Munich’s transfer dealings were very straightforward. The Bavarians operated on a strict “If they beat you, make them join you” policy that ensured a steady in-flow of the league’s best players but also swept a sizeable amount of driftwood into the Säbener Strasse reception. Having had half a decent game against the Bavarians was deemed enough for Bundesliga luminaries such as Alain Sutter, Marcel Witeczek or Vahid Hashemian to earn a contract with Munich’s finest.

This rather crude approach to squad building has since given way to a much more professional setup, and increased financial power has enabled Bayern to target bona-fide international stars rather then try their luck on mid-table heroes a la Jan Schlaudraff (Hannover 96). But in one important aspect, nothing has changed. When it comes to managers, the ability to beat Bayern is still considered the key requirement for any potential hopefuls.

Secret auditions for Pep Guardiola’s successor after 2016 have been taking place for a few good months now. Thomas Tuchel is currently on gardening leave, weighing up the option to destroy his career at Hamburg next season but he’s also an outside contender for the Allianz Arena bench, thanks to previous showings with Mainz. His reported move to Munich with his family has given rumours about him possibly succeeding Guardiola new credence. One particularly interesting theory doing the rounds at the moment is that he might accept a “soft start” as Guardiola’s assistant next season; a solution that would be very Barcelona.

Jürgen Klopp remains unavailable. Dieter Hecking, whose second-placed Wolfsburg team have found remarkable consistency in recent weeks, still lacks experience internationally. That leaves precious few genuine domestic candidates in an era of almost complete domestic hegemony. Markus Weinzierl (Augsburg) beat Bayern after they had won the championship last season, Sascha Lewandowski (Leverkusen) masterminded the only league defeat for Jupp Heynckes’s treble-winners in 2012-13. Both are not quite Bayern material, however – at least not yet, in Weinzierl’s case.

There’s one more man, though. Not just since Sunday’s 2-0 win over Bayern Munich by Borussia Mönchengladbach; but certainly more so than ever before. Lucien Favre, the professorial, highly-strung Swiss coach of the Foals, has been recognised as the best Gladbach coach in modern times for a while now. This season, he’s become a really big name, nationwide. In four years, he has taken the club from the relegation play-offs to the Europa League and now to the brink of a first-ever Champions League qualification. (They had only missed out on the group stage in the play-offs against Dynamo Kyiv in 2012). And he beat a Guardiola team that doesn’t get beaten, in a style that screamed “manager win”, as Süddeutsche Zeitung put it.

It would be hyperbole to say he out-coached the Catalan but his plan – and the players’ implementation of it – was so good that Bayern found no way to overcome it. Gladbach defended deep without being negative or passive, moved as a unit to close down spaces, forced Bayern to play long ball from the back and hit the league leaders on training-ground-choreographed counterattacks. The personnel and stage were markedly different, but the script of the game resembled that of José Mourinho’s Champions League final win over Louis van Gaal’s Reds in 2010. “That’s the Bundesliga,” said a dejected Guardiola. “If you win, people say it’s easy”.

“It was an uncomfortable evening for us,” remarked Karl-Heinz Rummenigge. The Bayern executive board chairman used to share hotel rooms with Favre during their time at Servette in Geneva 30 years ago. Even then, Rummenigge said, Favre was “crazy” about football, thinking and talking non-stop about the game to the annoyance of his less obsessed team-mates.

In his Gladbach cover-story last month, 11 Freunde’s Christoph Biermann described the 57-year-old as “a drama queen,” whose dithering in the transfer market has been the bane of the sporting director, Max Eberl, the co-architect of Gladbach’s resurrection. Like most successful, modern managers, he’s a man of marginal gains and micro-details who has taught the World Cup winner Christoph Kramer to tackle opponents with his outside leg because, according to Kramer, “you’re a faster by a 10th of a second that way” and watches DVDs of the opposition day and night.

He doesn’t have the aura of Klopp and his heavily-accented German comes across as a little droll. But there’s nobody in Germany – and perhaps nobody in the other three top leagues – who gets as much out of his squad right now. Gladbach’s wage bill is approximately £28m. Their net transfer spend since 2010-11 is close to zero. They have no external investors, no minority shareholders, not even a kind-hearted shirt-sponsor from an autocratic country. The club belongs to the fans. All their growth has been organic – including, one would hope, the one noticed by Kramer on Sunday. “Our balls grew after the second goal,” the Germany midfielder said after the final whistle.

It was Lucien’s luck that Manuel Neuer elected to get three years’ worth of blunders out of the way in one game. Twice, the Bayern keeper let Raffael’s shots slip through his fingers. “We didn’t lose [due] to Manu, but because of our problems in attack” said Guardiola, generously. That wasn’t strictly true. The defeat is of little consequence to the champions-elect but losing Arjen Robben (abdominal muscle tear) for a few weeks could hurt their Champions League chances. Guardiola’s team are the kings of control but they’re still a little too reliant on the wide players beating their opponents in one-v-ones to create proper openings. Others will try to follow Favre’s blueprint. The Bayern decision-makers, however, can probably sleep a little easier now. In the man from Saint-Barthélemy, they have one more name on the post-Pep shortlist.

Talking Points

• Joe Zinnbauer, the young manager of Hamburg, experienced a less than happy weekend. Following the 0-1 home defeat to Hertha, the club’s board pulled the plug on the 44-year-old after six months in charge. The sporting director, Peter Knäbel, takes over as the interim coach until the end of the season. “I was supposed to be on holiday,” he said at his first press conference on Monday. Knäbel is the 19th man on the coaching bench since 2000. That, coincidentally, was also the first and last time the 48-year-old coach a club: Winterthur, in the third Swiss division. No punch-line needed, it’s no longer funny. Hamburg have tried and failed to get relegated for a number of years now. But this year, you feel, they might finally succeed.

• The other HSV in the league, Hannover 96, are also slipping ever closer to the relegation spots. The coach, Tayfun Korkut, was reportedly an inch away from getting the axe after Dortmund’s 3-2 win in Lower Saxony on Saturday, but the deliciously named sporting director Dirk Dufner is persisting with him, for the moment. Whether Hannover’s Martin Kind will also stick with Dufner is another question altogether though.

• Wins for Stuttgart and Freiburg have made it an even bigger scrap at the wrong end of the table. Where the other half live, however, gaps have started to appear. Schalke were the big losers of the weekend after going down a 1-0 at home to penalty non-specialists Leverkusen. The Royal Blues are now six points behind Bayer (fourth spot), a first campaign without Champions League football since 2011-12 looms.

Missing out on the millions from Nyon could curtail their room fro manoeuvre in the transfer-market and intensify murmurs of discontent about the manager Roberto Di Matteo. So far, the Italian coach had been able to claim that he was doing as well as possible in light of many injuries but relegation to the Europa League would mark a set-back that couldn’t be explained away quite so easily. Schalke, to be fair, could have also drawn the game if it hadn’t been for the referee Peter Gagelmann denying them a clear penalty and an almost as clear indirect free-kick after an Ömer Toprak backpass in the box. But these things happen. The bigger concern must be that Leverkusen, despite their travails at Atlético in midweek, looked the fresher and tactically more coherent side throughout. Roger Schmidt, in case you’re wondering, is not on the Bayern radar just yet. He needs to beat them first. But he’s got a fan in important places. Guardiola, they whisper in Munich, rates him very highly.

Results: Hamburg 0-1 Hertha, Hannover 2-3 Dortmund, Freiburg 2-0 Augsburg, Stuttgart 3-1 Frankfurt, Köln 1-1 Bremen, Paderborn 0-0 Hoffenheim, Schalke 0-1 Leverkusen, Mainz 1-1 Wolfsburg, Bayern 0-2 Gladbach.