FREIBURG, Germany — The Bundesliga table on Sunday morning carried a line that nobody in German soccer had expected to see in October: the club from this university town of 230,000, with a wage bill roughly a sixth of the league’s largest, sat first on 17 points from seven matches, two clear of the champions from Munich.
Saturday’s 2-1 win over the club from Leverkusen was the fifth in a row, and it was built the way the whole run has been built. The winning goal, in the 78th minute, came from Jannik Rombach, a 21-year-old midfielder born in the suburb of Haslach who joined the academy at 9. The pass came from Elias Wernet, 23, from Emmendingen, 15 kilometers up the road. The man who won the ball back was Tobias Schüle, 25, from Lahr.
“People ask me whether this is a system or an accident,” said the club’s sporting director, Hendrik Falkner, standing in the tunnel afterward. “It is a system that has taken 20 years and that looks like an accident every autumn until it doesn’t.” He declined to discuss the title. “We are talking about seven games. Ask me in April.”
The club’s model is unusual even by the standards of a league that prides itself on fan ownership and modest spending. Its most expensive signing in history cost 9 million euros. It has sold players for a combined 310 million euros over the past decade, according to figures compiled by the data firm Transfermetrik, and has reinvested most of it in a youth campus that opened in 2021 at a cost of 42 million euros. The first team has not had a head coach from outside the club since 2011.
That continuity has produced a side that moves the ball with a kind of shorthand. Freiburg has completed 87 percent of its passes in the final third this season, the highest rate in the league, and has conceded only six goals, the fewest. “They play like people who have been having the same conversation since they were 12,” said Carolin Beutler, a tactics analyst for the broadcaster Sport1 who has followed the club for a decade. “Because they have.”
The city has noticed. Season tickets sold out in June for the sixth straight year, and the club said that applications for its waiting list rose 40 percent in the past month. On Saturday morning, the Münsterplatz market was a sea of red-and-black scarves, and the vendor Rudolf Kiefer, 66, who sells Black Forest ham from the same stall his father ran, said he had done a week’s trade by noon. “In 1993 we were in the second division and nobody came,” he said. “Now the Munich people want to know how we do it.”
Skeptics point to the calendar. Freiburg has played only two of the league’s traditional top six, and faces the clubs from Dortmund and Munich before the end of November. The last time a club outside that group led the table after seven rounds, in 2019, it finished eighth.
Mr. Falkner, asked whether the club would spend in January to protect its position, laughed. “We will do what we always do, which is nothing dramatic,” he said. “If that is a mistake, it is at least a mistake we understand.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section D, Page 11 of the European edition with the headline: A Black Forest Club With a Homegrown Midfield Sits Atop the Bundesliga in October.
