Xabi Alonso is on the verge of achieving something no other manager has in the history of German football, making him look lie the perfect candidate for Liverpool.

On Tuesday night, Xabi Alonso’s Bayer Leverkusen twice trailed in their DFB-Pokal quarter-final clash with Stuttgart. Waldemar Anton gave the visitors an early lead, and Chris Führich restored the advantage soon after Robert Andrich’s equalizer. Leverkusen’s chances of reaching the last four, and their long unbeaten run, were in real jeopardy.

However, Amine Adli would make it 2-2 midway through the second half, and then center-back Jonathan Tah struck in the 90th minute to snatch victory and extend his side’s run without a defeat to a whopping 30 matches. Even then, the last loss came away to Bochum on the final day of the 2022/23 season, when Adli was sent off in the eighth minute and Leverkusen went down 3-0. No team has beaten Alonso’s side with numerical parity since José Mourinho’s Roma secured a 1-0 first-leg victory in the Europa League semi-finals, 34 games ago. In that sense, the run is even better than you think.

Leverkusen is the only team in Europe’s big five leagues not to lose a game in any competition this season, and has held that unique honor for more than two months now, with French club Nice the last challenger to fall when it suffered a 1-0 loss to Nantes on December 2. Sometimes the word ‘unbeaten’ can disguise a significant number of draws, but Leverkusen has won 26 of those 30 games with a positive goal difference of 68, scoring a whopping 90 goals while conceding only 22.

The turnaround has been extraordinary. You’ll no doubt have heard this countless times by now, but it bears repeating — Leverkusen was in the relegation zone when Alonso’s predecessor Gerardo Seoane was sacked at the start of October 2022, and Die Werkself would surpass their points tally for the entire 22/23 season (50) after 20 games of the current campaign (52). Only Bayern Munich (the Bundesliga’s equivalent of ‘only Mohamed Salah’) have ever made a better start, with 56 points in 13/14 and 53 in 15/16 (via Opta Franz).

However, Leverkusen has already done something Bayern, or indeed any German team, has never managed, by remaining invincible across its first 25 matches of a new season. And it can achieve an even more prestigious record if it avoids defeat in its next three games, surpassing Bayern’s all-time best 32-game run from December 2019 to September 2020.

Alonso’s side has doubtless benefitted from favorable draws in the cup competitions. In the Europa League group stages, it faced Norwegian side Molde, Swedish outfit BK Häcken and Azerbaijani club Qarabağ, though it’s worth noting that it became the first team to come through with a 100 per cent record since Arsenal in 2020/21. Even Liverpool, with a similar margin of superiority over Toulouse, Union SG and LASK, could only manage 12 points.

Before facing Stuttgart in the DFB-Pokal, Leverkusen had met fourth-tier Teutonia Ottensen (a game it won 8-0), third-tier Sandhausen and second-tier Paderborn, but that shouldn’t be a knock on Alonso by any means. In the league, he’s preserved the ‘zero’ in the loss column despite facing RB Leipzig twice, hosting Borussia Dortmund and, in the toughest test of all, traveling to Bayern. Indeed, his team has already faced three of the five teams directly below it away from home.

Leverkusen needed a 94th-minute Exequiel Palacios equalizer at the Allianz Arena, but this isn’t a team that’s used to trailing. In fact, it has only spent 8.3 per cent of the Bundesliga season behind, a lower proportion than any other side in the league. Unlike Liverpool, it hasn’t had to be the comeback king to top the table, winning only six points from losing positions (the ninth-highest).

Fans at the BayArena can start to dream about winning their first-ever title as Invincibles, though they must still travel to Dortmund (April 20) and Eintracht Frankfurt (May 4) in huge tests of their mettle, and before that, they face a potentially season-defining game at home to Bayern at the weekend. Win, and they’ll be five points clear at the top of the table, and one game away from matching German football’s longest unbeaten run. If that isn’t evidence of his worthiness to succeed Jürgen Klopp at Liverpool, then what is?