Pep Guardiola may be on the cusp of the third Champions League triumph of his short career, this time with a Bayern Munich side that is starting to look eerily similar to his Barcelona teams.
From 2008-2012 Barcelona under Guardiola popularized a style of football that many pundits dubbed tiki-taka, a term that Guardiola himself hated. When asked about the style Guardiola said “I loathe all that passing for the sake of it, all that tiki-taka.”
Given Guardiola’s distain for the term he may have more sympathy with Xavi’s characterization of Barcelona’s style during his tenure: “We have the same idea as each other. Keep the ball, create movement around and off the ball, get in the spaces to cause danger.”
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Regardless of what you want to call it, Barcelona under Guardiola passed the ball a lot, with an emphasis on short high-accuracy passes. Since taking over at Bayern Munich, Guardiola has instituted a similar approach and a closer look at the passing data suggests even more similarities between his Bayern Munich and Barcelona teams.
From 2008-12, Barcelona averaged 723 passes per game, and 636 of them were short passes.
When Guardiola took over from Jupp Heynckes in 2013, Bayern Munich was coming off a Champions League title. Despite taking over an incredibly talented squad, Guardiola immediately changed the team’s playing style.
In 2012-13 Bayern Munich averaged 638 passes per game; since Guardiola has taken over they’ve averaged 760 passes per game, more than even his Barcelona sides.
There has also been a significant shift in the type of passes. During Heynckes’ 2012-13 season, Bayern Munich averaged 26 crosses per match. This dropped to 19 crosses per match in Guardiola’s first campaign and is now down to only 16 crosses per match this season. As with Barcelona the emphasis has been on short passes. In 2012-13 Bayern Munich averaged 532 short passes per game; over the past two seasons that number has shot up to 680 short passes per game.
Given how much Guardiola’s teams pass the ball, it is no surprise that they dominate possession. Barcelona averaged 66 percent possession over his tenure, and his Bayern Munich teams have averaged 68 percent possession.
These high numbers can often distort pass selection numbers since teams with lots of possession will inevitably have more passes of all types. To take this into account we can use possession adjusted statistics.
Possession adjusted statistics look at how many passes a team would have played if they had averaged 50 percent possession per match. This way we can more easily compare what types of passes teams are actually choosing to play when they have the ball instead of just looking at the raw numbers.
Even adjusting for possession this year’s Bayern Munich team average 486 possession-adjusted short passes per game, a number almost identical to the 485 possession-adjusted short passes per game that Barcelona averaged under Guardiola. It is also a significant increase over the 438 possession-adjusted short passes per game that Bayern Munich had under Heynckes.
In a little under two full seasons Guardiola has moulded Bayern Munich into a very similar team to the one he had at Barcelona. The one difficulty that Guardiola was always going to face at Bayern Munich was the weight of expectations, taking over a side coming off of a Champions League title.
Improving a team such a team is a near impossible task. Has Guardiola actually made Bayern Munich a better side by completely changing their playing style? The short answer is maybe.
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Obviously, Guardiola was unable to match Heynckes’ European success last season as they lost in the semifinals to Real Madrid, but despite the end result the team put up similar underlying numbers.
One of the best measures of a team’s ability is their Total Shots Ratio. TSR is the ratio of how many shots a team takes relative to the total number of shots it takes and concedes. A side with a TSR of 0.5 takes the same amount of shots as their opponents, and anything higher than 0.5 means the team is outshooting their opponents. TSR includes all shots directed at goal, whether or not they are on target.
In 2012-13, Bayern Munich had a TSR of 0.68, and in Guardiola’s first season they also had an identical TSR of 0.68. Looking at shots only tells part of the story. A team that consistently dominates their opponents in terms of shots will tend to win out over the long run, but in the context of the Champions League where ties are won and lost over two legs shot dominance doesn’t always guarantee success. That being said Guardiola’s Bayern Munich team this year has an even more impressive TSR of 0.71.
This improved TSR gives credence to the argument that under Guardiola’s tutelage Bayern Munich has become a more dominant team. Will that be enough to actually emulate the success of the 2012-13 side? That’s hard to say.
Bayern Munich will face their first real test of the Champions League knockout stages this week against FC Porto and their performance in that tie will certainly gives us a better indication of what to expect going forward. One thing is clear though: Pep Guardiola hasn’t missed a beat importing his signature playing style from Barcelona to Bayern Munich.
Sam Gregory is a soccer analytics writer based in Montreal. Follow him on Twitter