Stuttgart produced their most convincing performance of the season on Saturday, beating Bayer Leverkusen 4-2 away at the BayArena to inject some much-needed confidence into a campaign that had been threatening to unravel. The win lifts the club to 10th in the Bundesliga table with nine points from eight games, a significant improvement after a run that had seen them sitting as low as 15th following a damaging 2-3 home defeat to then-pointless Borussia Mönchengladbach.

That Gladbach result had crystallised the problems around the club. Lothar Matthäus had publicly questioned whether the captaincy was weighing on striker Deniz Undav, saying the 30-year-old had lost his natural ease in front of goal and was thinking too much. Undav had gone seven Bundesliga games without scoring before the Leverkusen match, a drought that had become a talking point beyond Stuttgart. Coach Sebastian Hoeneß responded by tightening training, removing the security of guaranteed starting places and addressing individual errors openly within the squad. Whether the Leverkusen victory signals a genuine turning point or a temporary lift remains to be seen.

Attention now shifts to Europe. Stuttgart travel to Istanbul on 3 November to face Galatasaray in the Champions League at the Rams Global Stadyumu, a fixture that carries real weight given the club's ambitions in the competition this season.