Germany: Dortmund Completes Long Climb to Bundesliga Title

The Champagne might follow later, but inside Borussia Dortmund’s mammoth 80,720-strong full house, the party began fittingly with beer this weekend. Dortmund, the club that almost died of bankruptcy several times over the past two decades, is the Deutscher Meister — the new and thoroughly deserved champion of the Bundesliga. As it closed out a title it had led from mid-autumn to spring, by beating Nuremberg, 2-0, on Saturday, grown men either jumped up and down where they stood, or simply began to cry. They had never thought they would see their team, their city, back on top of the pile. And the fact that the players celebrated in front of them with a giant tankard of beer was perfectly fitting, because the club’s very name was borrowed, more than a century ago, from a local brewery by that name.