Bayern München vs 1. FC Köln

There was never any doubt about what this fixture was for. Bayern München arrived at the final round of the season 86 points into a campaign that had put them top of the table long before kick-off, and they treated Köln's visit less as a contest than as a formality to be dispatched with the minimum of fuss. It took them 10 minutes to make that plain.

Harry Kane opened the scoring in the 10th minute from a Joshua Kimmich assist, and did the same again in the 13th, the same passer supplying the same finisher twice inside 3 minutes. That Köln were still in the game at all owed everything to Said El Mala, who pulled one back in the 18th minute and gave his side a foothold that briefly looked meaningful. It did not survive long. Tom Bischof restored the two-goal cushion in the 22nd minute, teed up by Lennart Karl, and by that point the shape of the afternoon was set: four goals inside 12 minutes, three of them Bayern's, Kane's pair bookending El Mala's reply before Bischof shut the door on it.

That opening quarter of an hour told you most of what you needed to know about the gulf between the two sides. Bayern finished the match with 69 per cent of the ball and 19 shots to Köln's nine, eleven of them from inside the box against Köln's single effort from outside their own. Köln completed 266 of 327 passes, a serviceable 81 per cent that meant little against opponents completing 659 of 724. None of that is a mystery once you have watched a side concede three goals it could do nothing about inside twelve first-half minutes and spend the rest of the afternoon chasing a game that had already been decided.

The half's discipline told its own small story. Joel Schmied was booked for a foul in the 34th minute and Konrad Laimer for one in the 37th, and both men were withdrawn at the interval, Kompany sending on Josip Stanišić for Laimer and Lukas Kwasniok replacing Schmied with Linton Maina. Neither change altered the balance of a game whose balance had already tipped. What both did was manage risk that no longer had a reason to be run.

The second half was administration rather than argument. Manuel Neuer made way for Jonas Urbig in the 60th minute, and Karl was replaced by Michael Olise a minute later, changes that had the character of a manager protecting his squad rather than one chasing anything. Köln, for their part, brought on Ísak Bergmann Jóhannesson for Alessio Castro-Montes in the 69th minute, the same minute in which Kane completed his hat-trick, converting this time from a Leon Goretzka pass rather than a Kimmich one. Three goals from the same forward, created by two different midfielders, is not a matter of one good service line. It is a team finding him from wherever the ball happens to be, which is a different and more damning problem for whoever is meant to be marking him.

Jamal Musiala's departure for Raphaël Guerreiro in the 70th minute was the last meaningful Bayern adjustment of the afternoon, a substitution made with the outcome long settled. Köln made a double change in the 80th minute, Marius Bülter off for Youssoupha Niang and, more tellingly, El Mala himself withdrawn for Jan Uwe Thielmann. Taking off your best performer with the game gone is not a tactical statement. It is an admission.

The final goal arrived with a flourish that owed something to timing. Nicolas Jackson came on for Goretzka in the 83rd minute and scored in the same minute, finished by a Luis Díaz assist, the fifth Bayern goal of the afternoon and the shortest route any substitute took to the scoresheet all day. Köln's last act was a late change of their own, Jakub Kamiński off for Florian Kainz in the 92nd minute, tidying up a scoreline that had stopped being in doubt an hour earlier.

The case for man of the match does not need much building. Kane scored 3 of Bayern's 5 goals from two different providers, was rated the best performer on the pitch, and did it in a fixture his side had already won before he arrived on it in a footballing sense. Kimmich created more chances than anyone else on his own side, four of them, and made the platform Kane worked from, but this was Kane's afternoon by any honest reading of it, his full name, Harry Kane, worth writing out once for a display that put a full stop on a season in which Bayern had led from the front from very early on. The case for Köln is smaller and no less real. El Mala was his side's best performer by a distance the ratings support, scoring their only goal and offering the one moment of the match in which Köln looked capable of hurting anyone. Sebastian Sebulonsen, by contrast, was rated the weakest performer on the pitch, and a back line asked to contain 19 shots was never going to flatter its members.

Set against the season, none of this needed the 90 minutes to confirm it. Bayern went into the match on 86 points with a goal difference of plus 82, having won 27 of their 33 league games, and closed out the campaign with 4 wins and a draw in their previous five before this one, the form of a side that had run away with the division long before the final round arrived. They finished top of the table last season too, and a result like this one looks exactly like what a side that has led from front to back does to a struggling visitor on the last day: routine, comprehensive, almost bored with itself. A DFB-Pokal fixture against VfB Stuttgart awaits them within the week, a different examination for a side that has passed every other one this season.

Köln's picture is harder and more honest. 32 points from thirty-three games, level with Werder Bremen, with a goal difference of minus 10 built from 7 wins, 11 draws and 15 defeats, is the record of a side that has spent a season drawing matches it needed to win and losing the ones that mattered. Their previous five games had brought 1 win, 2 draws and 2 defeats, the most recent a 1-3 home reverse to Heidenheim that set the tone for exactly the kind of afternoon Bayern then gave them. Kwasniok's side head into the close season with a cup tie against Würzburger Kickers and Bundesliga fixtures against Hoffenheim and Stuttgart to come, a schedule that offers no immediate reckoning but does not disguise the one this season has already delivered.