Leverkusen win 4-3 at Mainz but look nothing like Alonso's side

Bayer Leverkusen beat Mainz 05 4-3 at the MEWA Arena on 10 October 2026, a seven-goal match that lifted them to fourth in the Bundesliga. Robert Andrich scored after five minutes, Patrik Schick after nine, Jarell Quansah on 55 and Moussa Diaby on 65.

That is the surface. The deeper question is what kind of team is doing the winning. Under Xabi Alonso in 2023/2024, Leverkusen took 2.65 points per game across a 34-match league season, with 28 wins, six draws and no defeats. The current return is lower, and the available squad turnover helps explain why that earlier balance has not returned. Since the summer, Leverkusen have added Kennet Eichhorn, Facundo Medina, Aleksa Damjanović, Guéla Doué, Miguel Gutiérrez and Luca Erlein, while Exequiel Palacios, Andrea Natali, Ferdinand Pohl, Matěj Kovár, Alejo Sarco and Emmanuel Chigozie Owen have left.

The match data against Mainz shows a side that scored heavily without dominating the ball or the territory. Leverkusen had 53 per cent possession to Mainz's 47, and 16 shots to Mainz's 23. They managed seven shots on target to Mainz's five, and four big chances to Mainz's two. Mainz's expected goals figure was 2.87; Leverkusen's was 1.69. Leverkusen's goals-minus-xG in this match was 2.31, against an average of 0.0 across their earlier 2026/2027 matches in all competitions. Their touches in the opposition box numbered 26, against an average of 40.6 across those earlier matches. Their corners here were three, against an average of 8.6.

Those are single-match figures, not a trend, and the current-season record is too short to call one. But they sit alongside a result that reads as a shootout rather than a controlled win.

This is where the raw numbers and the match reports can be read side by side. The reports describe Leverkusen edging a seven-goal thriller and moving up to fourth. The shot count and xG describe a game in which Mainz carried more of the attacking load. Both can be true: Leverkusen won, and Leverkusen were not the more persistent attacking force.

The open questions are straightforward. How much of this squad remains from the Alonso era, and how much of the current identity is simply a transitional phase? Is Martínez Novell being judged against a benchmark — 2.65 points per game, unbeaten across a full league season — that any successor would struggle to match? Can Mainz sustain their start under Fischer despite this defeat? And what does Leverkusen's defensive record say about their title credentials this season?

Five league games is too small a sample to answer any of those. What the Mainz match does show is a Leverkusen side winning games in a way that looks different from the Alonso-built team: fewer touches in the box, fewer corners, lower xG, more goals than the underlying numbers imply. Whether that becomes a new identity or a temporary phase is what the coming months will decide.