“At the moment, my job is easy,” Bayern Munich’s sporting director told a group of international journalists over a traditional Bavarian breakfast with Weißwurt und Weißbier in mid January.  “But if we lose against Gladbach on Friday night, there’ll be drama again”. That was in 2012, and Christian Nerlinger’s casual premonition soon became painfully true as “autumn champions” Bayern stumbled to a 3-1 defeat at the Borussia Park and eventually ended up losing out on all three titles. Nerlinger was fired the following summer. Manager Jupp Heynckes, too, came close to getting axed.

Very few clubs are as unforgiving. Seven months into the job in Bavaria, Pep Guardiola knows that an unbeaten run of 16 Bundesliga games will count for nothing if Bayern don’t go on to lift silverware in the Spring. “In the last ten years, there were eight coaches here,” he recounted on Thursday. “That shows me that it’s not easy to stay here. You’re not staying here because of your personality or because you’re handsome - it’s because you’re winning”.

Recent history suggests that the 43-year-old will have his work cut out. Bayern struggled a lot more in the season curtain-raiser in August than the 3-1 result shows; on another day, they could have lost the game against a side that is brimming with attacking talent. Of the last 23 games at Gladbach, the Bavarians only won three. And this season, Lucien Favre’s side have won eight of nine home matches and drawn the other. “They are a great team with great organisation,” said Guardiola. Fortunately for the Catalan and his men, their supreme dominance in the first half of the season has left them with a big, fluffy, seven-point cushion and that’s with a game versus Stuttgart in hand. A Rückrunde (second half of the season) collapse like that in 2011/12 is all but unimaginable. So in the grand scheme of things, the result won’t matter all that much for the visitors. Both Guardiola and Nerlinger’s successor Matthias Sammer are safe enough.

But the game, a veritable Bundesliga classic, is nevertheless hugely important for Borussia, as well as the rest of the league. For the home side, Friday night first of all offers the opportunity to lay down a marker in their fight for the Champions League places. Sporting director Max Eberl made the point that his club are punching well above their weight financially: “Dortmund, Schalke and Wolfsburg have double or treble the amount of financial firepower,” he said. In order to make continued progress, Gladbach could really do with the millions from UEFA. The money would help with keeping talented players like Raffael, Patrick Herrmann and Kruse and also make contract negotiations with Favre more straightforward. The Swiss manager, whose current deal expires in 2015, is highly-rated and was linked with the Bayern job before Pep took over.

Borussia’s strong performances at home as well as a sudden raft of injuries in the Bayern camp - Bastian Schweinsteiger and Javier Martinez are definitely out, Franck Ribéry is doubtful - provide them with a decent enough chance to stem the Red tide, perhaps even the best one of all in the remaining campaign: Bayern have already successfully negotiated trips to Schalke (4-0), Dortmund (3-0) and Leverkusen (1-1). On paper, this is their last tricky assignment (Wolfsburg might disagree though).

“We want to be the first team to beat them this season,” said striker Max Kruse. Another effortless win for Pep’s men would conversely only increase fears of the Meisterschaft turning into a procession. Bayern’s confidence in their own strength is such that chairman of the board Karl-Heinz Rummenigge was moved to express his hope for more competition. “We need five or six teams in the Bundesliga who challenge, that is our wish,” he said in an interview with Kicker on Thursday. The sentiment might be genuine, but it’ll be tough to square with Bayern’s over-riding aim to be the best team in Europe, let alone in Germany. In the meantime, the best the neutrals can hope for is maybe a little set-back. “The whole of German football” will root for Gladbach, Favre said with a smile. That prediction will certainly prove accurate.

Straight into the action? Wolfsburg signing Kevin De Bruyne is set to face Hanover this weekend

Bundesliga Talking Points

Bundesliga clubs loathe to do serious business in the January but there are always exceptions. Wolfsburg parted with €22m to secure the services of Chelsea attacking midfielder Kevin De Bruyne  in a spectacular move that underlined the club’s re-emergence as a genuine Champions League contender. The Belgium is expected to go straight into the starting line-up against Hannover but he’ll probably have to play wide to accommodate Brazilian playmaker Diego on Saturday.

Dutch winger Ola John has been second-biggest incoming transfer. HSV managed to get the 21-year-old on loan from Benfica until the end of the season, as a replacement for Maximilian Beister, who picked up a serious knee injury. John was one of the stars of Twente Enschede but has been out of favour under Jesus Jorge recently.

An unusual deal brought South-Korean Dong-Won Ji from Sunderland back to Augsburg. The forward will sign for Dortmund in the summer but has been parked (no pun intended) at the SGL Arena for the next six months. Unfortunately, the 22-year-old can’t play due to a dead leg in Saturday’s game - against Dortmund, of course.

Julian Draxler is still at Schalke, despite the club’s best attempts to invite an offer from Arsenal. The German international won’t feature at Hamburg on Sunday but long-time absentees Kyriakos Papadopoulos and Klaas-Jan Huntelaar are back. It’ll be interesting to see whether they can turn things around for unloved manager Jens Keller.

The members of Hamburger SV, the (quite literally) biggest underachievers in the league, have voted to separate the football department from the rest of the club and to turn the former into a company, 25 per cent of which can be sold off to outside investors. The change will not be implemented immediately - the board need to come up with a detailed plan and put it to another vote - but the decision has opened the door to a more professional set-up; at least in theory. The members have effectively disenfranchised themselves but the frustration with years of financial and sporting mismanagement was so strong that this radical proposal was accepted as the only way out.