It’s a bit too early to call it a fairytale. For that, the end needs to be happy, as opposed to the beginning, as in horror movies. The SC Paderborn coach André Breitenreiter wasn’t being a Germanic killjoy when he pointed out as much after the 2-0 win over Hannover lifted his side to the top of the table. He was just being genuine. “It’s a dream that we’re unbeaten after four games but nothing has changed for us,” the 40-year-old said. “All that we’re concerned with is staying up.” The general manager Michael Born joked that a printout of the table would make nice “wallpaper in the fan shop”. That’s only if you like Mainz (2nd) and Hoffenheim (3rd) though – they also have eight points, along with the champions Bayern Munich after their 0-0 draw at Hamburg.

Weakness from the big four Champions League clubs – Dortmund lost 2-0 in Mainz, Leverkusen 4-1 in Wolfsburg, Schalke drew 2-2 – has allowed smaller clubs to enjoy lofty positions in table. Things will recalibrate soon enough. But it would be wrong to dismiss Paderborn’s achievements as a statistical quirk.

The fact that the small club from East-Westfalia have made it to the top flight in the first place borders on the miraculous. Their stadium, the Benteler-Arena (capacity 15,000) is tiny. They have only one training pitch and have to get changed in the caretaker’s adjoining flat. There is no scouting network, no underfloor heating. Some locals have taken SC to court over evening kick-offs and won: football is officially verboten after 10pm. Last season’s budget was a less than princely €6.2m. Not per player – in total.

Promotion has added an extra €9m to the wage bill but that’s still nothing compared to the more established teams. “We are the most rank outsiders ever,” Breitenreiter said at the start of the season. The former journeyman pro with Hannover, HSV, Wolfsburg, Unterhaching and Born has had to be extra clever in putting together a team of unknown, unremarkable and unwanted players. The striker Süleyman Koc, for example, had served a prison sentence for taking part in robberies before Paderborn took a chance on him 18 months ago. The left-back Daniel Brückner, 33, a cult hero, used to be homeless in his youth. You’d expect a never-say-die attitude from such a wild bunch (“We slave away, we fight, we spit, we bite, we scratch,” the midfielder Moritz Stoppelkamp said) but it takes a good manager to challenge this determination into meaningful actions on the pitch.

“We don’t do anything different than others,” a modest Breitenreiter told ZDF Sportstudio on Saturday. That’s not entirely true. Paderborn’s full throttle pressing and counter-pressing game might no longer be a novelty in a league where most teams aspire to such tactics. But executed as well as Paderborn have been able to do it, the strategy can still successfully negate differences in quality. Whereas a newly promoted, understaffed team would have been inclined to mass the defence and wait for a counterattack, the new orthodoxy demands going at it hammer and tongs. That is not to say it always works. Eintracht Braunschweig, back down in Bundesliga 2 after one season, offer a cautionary tale in that respect, while Augsburg’s continued success, by contrast, shows that longevity can be achieved, too.

Breitenreiter was part of a similar story while playing for Unterhaching in the top flight at the turn of the century and has seen how difficult it is to sustain momentum. “They didn’t take the right steps and vanished [as a consequence],” he said. Paderborn will have to invest in their infrastructure and in that sense promotion might have come too early. The upshot is that no one truly expects them to fend off relegation, which puts them in a comfortable position. “They have nothing to lose, they will be aggressive again,” Pep Guardiola said before the top-of-the-table clash with Breitenreiter’s men at the Allianz Arena on Tuesday night.

The Bayern keeper Manuel Neuer might think twice about going on one of his extended runs with the ball then. On Saturday, Neuer made “the best save of the game” after haring out of his area, losing possession near the halfway line, and diving into a tackle to recover. A yellow card seemed scant punishment for his indiscretion but then again, HSV didn’t have Stoppelkamp on the pitch to turn the situation into an obvious goal-scoring opportunity. The 27-year-old scored from 82.3 metres against Hannover on Saturday; 96 keeper Ron-Robert Zieler had vacated his post to try and force a late equaliser. The ball trickled into the net instead. “I didn’t know I could hit it that far,” Stoppelkamp joked.

Mario Götze, of Maracanã fame, might not win the Sportschau Goal of the Year award after all. The longest-distance strike in the history of the Bundesliga had been particularly long coming for Stoppelkamp. He played for Hannover in 2011 and 2012, without much success. “People jeered me and insulted me in the streets,” he said. “The goal made amends for that, obviously”.

Next stop: Bayern. “We don’t go there to take photos with world champions,” Breitenreiter said. “I firmly believe that we won’t go home with nil points,” added the club president and benefactor Wilfried Finke. The 62-year-old had half-jokingly predicted a tally of 10 points from the opening four games and certainly won’t begrudge Breitenreiter of missing that target by two. Europe’s unlikeliest league leaders (no offence, Austria’s Wolfsberger AC) might not have enough to shake off the champions but their tactical coherence and fearlessness will cause plenty of trouble for bigger clubs who have neither of these attributes. Watch out Stuttgart, Werder et al – those six points you took for granted back in July could be missing at the end.

Talking points

• Saturday also taught us that Dangerous Minds isn’t only a lame 90s thriller with Michelle Pfeiffer. Mainz 05, Jürgen Klopp’s old club, beat Borussia Dortmund 2-0 to climb all the way to second spot. Shinji – no not that Shinji, the other Shinji, Shinji Okazaki – opened the scoring for the home side. Then Ciro Immobile missed a penalty before Matthias Ginter scored an own goal. “We deserved to lose for being too passive in the head,” Klopp said. To make matters worse, the playmaker Henrikh Mkhitaryan picked up an injury and will be out for four weeks.

• Hamburg still haven’t scored this season. But under their new coach Joe Zinnbauer, they celebrated a 0-0 draw against Bayern that felt like a victory. “He got us going with a really loud talk,” the midfielder Tolgay Arslan said. HSV were full of passion while Bayern hardly bothered to turn up. Zinnbauer, who was promoted from U23 coach, is real character, that much is clear. The 44-year-old set up a financial services company during his days as player; it reportedly turns over more than €70m a year. That probably makes Zinnbauer the best-paid coach in European football, even if his club only account for a fraction of that sun,

• Red cards come with good wishes and money – but only in China. In Gelsenkirchen, Julian Draxler received the most unwelcome card from the referee Markus Schmidt after lashing out, Beckham-style, at Frankfurt’s Carlos Zambrano. Draxler has been suspended for two games and will miss the derby against Dortmund. Kevin-Prince Boateng also had to drive home in a little red corvette, metaphorically speaking, but the Royal Blues still managed to draw 2-2. Not enough for Jens Keller to be able to work in peace over the next few weeks, not enough to make Horst Heldt bring out the axe either. Plus ça change, as they say in the Ruhr area.

• Talking of sacrificial lambs, it was encouraging to hear that Hennes the Eighth, the live goat mascot of 1. FC Köln, survived the Rhine derby against Borussia Mönchengladbach unscathed. He had been put under police protection the week before. There were clashes between supporters on Sunday but on the pitch everything remained rather too quiet. Remarkably, Köln have yet to concede a goal this season after the 0-0 draw.

Results Freiburg 2-2 Hertha BSC, Mainz 2-0 Dortmund , Schalke 2-2 Frankfurt, Augsburg 4-2 Bremen, Paderborn 2-0 Hannover, HSV 0-0 Bayern, Stuttgart 0-2 Hoffenheim, Wolfsburg 4-1 Leverkusen, Köln 0-0 Gladbach.