Last season was Pep Guardiola’s first at Bayern Munich. He won the league in record time, with one point fewer than a record points total, and with a 29 point gap over second-place Borussia Dortmund.
He also won the DFB-Pokal (German Cup), beating Dortmund in the final. In the Champions League, there was relative disappointment, with Bayern losing to Real Madrid, the eventual winner, in the semifinals.
So, naturally, Guardiola has spent the off-season picking apart his team. Players have come and gone; positions have been readjusted and rearranged; paradigms have been played around with mercilessly. Phillip Lahm is teetering on playing in goal.
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On the face of it, it’s been a simple summer of transfers with nothing too outrageous. Toni Kroos was allowed to leave for Real Madrid and Mario Mandzukic for Atletico Madrid, while in the other direction, Robert Lewandowski (last season’s Bundesliga top scorer) has arrived, and so has Xabi Alonso. A midfielder and a striker out, followed by a midfielder and a striker in, is normal business. Take into account defender Mehdi Benatia from Roma, replacing the injured Javi Martinez, and you might even call it good business.
But this is the work of Guardiola, the man who once lost interest in the greatest midfield triumvirate the world has ever known—Xavi-Busquets-Iniesta—despite it delivering two Champions League titles in three seasons. As soon as you look into how he’s used his new signings, it starts getting a little odder—and a lot fiddlier.
For a start, Lewandowski represents a commitment to a less straightforward focal point up front. Where Mandzukic, the traditional “big guy” up front, mitigated against all the fluidity behind him in a way we’re used to seeing—see Chelsea with Eden Hazard, Oscar, Cesc Fabregas and Andre Schurrle behind Diego Costa—Lewandowski pushes Bayern towards becoming one huge, homogenous, gloopy mass, where strikers and midfielders are that bit more indistinguishable. It’s one step away from a “false-nine” again, and Guardiola has been known to walk pretty quickly with these things.
Meanwhile, Alonso, one of the best midfielders in the world, played his first game for Bayern this weekend—at centre-back. You get the idea.
And the muddled-up theme continues with the players who were in place already. Lahm, David Alaba and Thomas Muller have all occupied at least three different positions already this season and they represent some of the more stable elements of the team. For positions other than the ones occupied by those three, take your pick from any of the other 13 players Guardiola has used in the first two league games. Plus Frank Ribery, Thiago Alacantara, Rafinha and Benetia, all still to get involved.
Once you add in tactical adjustments by the minute, working off an unconventional 3-5-2 formation, it’s easy enough to understand why a team that won the league by those 29 points has failed to win two of its four official games so far. Or why nothing we’ve seen in any of those games was entirely convincing.
Enough people to matter will tell you that the tinkering, whether justifiable in the long term or not, has operated as a distraction. Corresponding reports of Bayern so far tend to agree that there’s been “a lack of intensity”. Certainly that was the case in the game I watched at the weekend, where Schalke was allowed to come back into a game it trailed 1-0 and take a point, despite Bayern’s early dominance and “best” 25 minutes in the last six months according to its coach.
There was too little cohesion, perhaps, and a team with no momentum yet, definitely. Concerns were raised, rightly or wrongly.
We shouldn’t read too much into it, but the whole thing is slightly reminiscent of how Guardiola finished at Barcelona. There, after three seasons of amazing success, he seemed antsy. He brought in a back three, he often moved Andres Iniesta out wide to accommodate Cesc Fabregas and he moved Javier Mascherano permanently to centre back. He ended up losing La Liga to Real Madrid for the first time—still a brilliant record, but now one with a dent which you might well have blamed on him a little. “Did he need so many changes?” you wondered at the time, as you might now.
At Bayern, to be fair, he’s been making changes like this from the start, often with success. He came in and instantly began tinkering with a Champions League-winning team. He moved Lahm into midfield early on and it was symbolic of a wider shift: his team would keep the ball more, move formations constantly and Gotze would sometimes play as a false-nine. And it would win, too.
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But there are two emerging problems with the situation now. Firstly, the one failure of last season—defeat to Real Madrid—was widely attributed, by Guardiola himself as much as anyone else, to his elaborate tactics. Secondly, there was some benefit of the doubt given over Guardiola’s perpetual-motion brand of team selection last season, on the understanding that it would eventually calm down, once his ideas had been implanted onto his team. Now that seems not to have happened, and the results early on are an imperfect defence at best, so there are some legitimate questions over what happens next.
Just as interesting as those questions is why Guardiola feels the need for constant adjustment, as seems to. Does he really feel it’s necessary? Is that it just that simple?
One thing it looks a bit like is boredom. We’re talking about one of the most successful coaches in history, who’s already won everything—and most things more than once. So far in his career he’s only managed elite-level players. It’s almost as if he has to create his own challenges, because merely winning is both overly achievable and already-achieved for this guy.
Would that be ridiculous? I can’t tell. Maybe he’s just aspiring for something bigger than we can see at the moment and will be vindicated with time—we are, obviously, too early into the season to judge. Pep should be careful, is all. Because whether there is a bigger picture or not, if no-one else can see it, they won’t take your word for it for very long, however many trophies you’ve won.
That’s football, I’m afraid. A lot of people think Phillip Lahm should just play at full back…
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter