Here’s what we know for absolute sure about the top table of European football at this moment in time.
One: the best English clubs are in a state of controlled disarray—not doing anything appalling, exactly, and usually making sure to do enough to avoid the dreaded word "crisis," but collectively forgetting how to win games in the Champions League and, even more mysteriously, how to beat West Ham.
Two: last year’s Champions League finalists, Juventus, look just that little bit weaker than last season and will therefore probably not be capable of the same impact as it managed back then, this season.
Three: the teams to beat are still Bayern Munich, Real Madrid and Barcelona.
Very few people would disagree with any of that.
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A more controversial statement would be to suggest that Bayern Munich is currently the team to beat from those three teams to beat. This is far trickier territory, because of course it involves a sizing-up process that is really more about predicting the future than describing the present. Being "the best" in September is not really the aim of the game, so when we allocate a "team to beat" we are actually trying to suggest who will be the best in May, based on how they look now, which, as I say, is not necessarily easy.
But this future-based analysis is in fact where Bayern’s strength lies. It doesn’t even look that good right now; it just looks precisely like it will look really good in May—the inside track being that it has used the early stages of this season to unveil a squad of ridiculous variety and, most tellingly of all, vast, vast depth. Rivals: be intimidated.
Now I’m not a great follower of the depth cult that has infiltrated much of modern football fandom and management. I don’t like the wasted talent it leads to sitting on benches, I don’t like the dominance of the few over the many it causes, and, very often, I don’t think it leads to the creation of great, cohesive football teams. But in the case of Bayern this season, if it’s managed properly by Pep Guardiola, it’s hard not to see the depth of its squad as an advantage over the Spanish duo of Barcelona and Real—a suggestion mainly inspired by what we have already seen of those other two’s weaknesses.
Barca’s early season form has, for me, been defined not by the success embedded within its sequence of narrow league wins against difficult opponents (this weekend apart), but by the necessity of those narrow wins. They didn’t involve a string of missed chances; rather, the score reflected the reality of a team that looks still very good, of course, but also very fragile, having lacked the ability to sign players for the last two transfer windows and steadily lost a core of experienced players either to other clubs, ageing legs or both.
With no Xavi, no Pedro and only the remnants of Dani Alves, there is a slight sense of a club that is, for the moment, holding itself together, hoping to get to January so it can bring its new signings in. The problem with this approach is that at that point the physical and mental strain that comes with fighting on all fronts with limited playing resources could become a major hindrance in the final few months of the season, when the trophies get handed out. While this isn’t certain, it also isn’t difficult to imagine.
Real’s squad hasn’t had the same limitations imposed on it and thus struggles with a different kind of depth-related problem. It’s called cohesion. Real’s got the numbers, sure; what it so far lacks is the ability to utilize them effectively. One week it starts with Isco, Gareth Bale and Cristiano Ronaldo, and it scores six. The next week it has to operate without Bale and it can’t pull more than a goal clear of Granada.
Although it’s early, the feel of things at Real is very much reminiscent of Rafa Benitez’s short time at Chelsea, where with Juan Mata, Oscar and Eden Hazard in place his team looked great, but when he rotated, that greatness very quickly transformed into a very clear absence of greatness. While this is hardly a destructive failing, in the marginal-gains world of top-class sport, it’s easy to see it making a definitive difference in, say, a Champions League competition that was very close. Because you don’t always get to play your best team, do you?
Which leaves Bayern. Guardiola’s team has, early on this season, looked like a massive collection of talent—enhanced hugely over the summer by the arrivals of Arturo Vidal and Douglas Costa—but it’s simultaneously been able to balance off that heavy list of talent with the ability to keep winning comfortably whoever’s in the team. Last week against Olympiakos, one Bayern team won 3-0 in the Champions League. At the weekend against Darmstadt, half of an entirely different Bayern team also won 3-0 in the Bundesliga.
This kind of heavy rotation has had negative effects in the past at the club—as I wrote before it kicked off this season—and there remain some of the same good reasons as ever to doubt that so many changes are healthy, particularly if they continue further into the season. And yet there is somehow already a different feel to it this time. Somehow, alongside this season’s versions of Real and Barca, it already feels more like an advantage than it has been before.
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If that sounds vague, then I have two potential explanations for this different "feel." The first is that Guardiola has simply reached a point where he has so many outrageously gifted players to play around with, it now basically seems as though it’s impossible for him to fail. Even if he does everything wrong, one of Arjen Robben, Costa, Robert Lewandowski or Thomas Muller will pull him out of any difficult moment.
The second is that, finally, after two seasons of rolling rotation under the Spanish coach, Bayern has become immune to the problems of rotation; so many combinations have been tried out that, by now, they are very rarely entirely new, and what’s more the frequent changes have now gone on for so long that the players are simply used to it.
Whichever explanation gets your vote, the essential truth is that Bayern’s first few games this season have done what any potential "team to beat of the teams to beat" must do: they’ve suggested a capacity not only to be good in the short term, but more importantly in the longer term, over the next few months.
Quite simply, if you have around 18 players who are performing to a really high standard for you, in whatever order you put them out, and your two most powerful rivals have far fewer, then you’re a decent bet to hold out strongest over the course of an attritional season.
On second thoughts, that’s not too controversial either, is it?
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter