Bayern are batshit but too big to fail
Bayern have made a mental choice sacking Julian Nagelsmann but probably won't pay the price.
In case you haven’t seen, for any I’ve recently launched an Arsenal-focused newsletter as well and you can find it here.
Anyway …
I had been wondering what my next newsletter would look like, since my last one already covered the league’s two biggest stories right now — the improved form of Borussia Dortmund and Schalke making the league interesting at both ends.
Thanks to Bayern Munich, it is even more interesting at the top now. After 10 successive titles in a row, I guess it is now deemed unacceptable for anyone to dare to even sit top of the league for a week in March. Dortmund are a point clear as they prepare for a trip to Munich and it just will not do. Julian Nagelsmann has been fired less than two seasons after Bayern reportedly paid €25m to get him out of RB Leipzig.
Nagelsmann won the league last season. Then Bayern lost Robert Lewandowski, who had provided them with well over a goal-a-game for the previous three seasons, and signed Sadio Mané, who is 30, not a striker, and has missed large chunks of the season through injury.
And despite all that, Bayern are in the Champions League quarter-finals (they have won all eight games to get there — against PSG, Barcelona, Inter, Viktoria Plzen — with seven clean sheets) and will be top of the Bundesliga by the end of their next game if they just beat Borussia Dortmund, as they have done in each of the last eight Bundesliga campaigns, scoring 33 goals and conceding just six in those meetings.
To sack the head coach now is obviously, on the face of it, mental.
Teams don’t always get the results they deserve (or get results they don’t really deserve) and the Bundesliga table doesn’t quite do Bayern justice this season. Even though they lost Lewandowski, they’re about as dominant as ever. There are issues defensively but that’s to be expected when Manuel Neuer has played just 12 of 25 games. The team is also tilted further forward in an attempt to make up for the goals lost by Lewandowski’s exit. And it has worked! Bayern’s xG isn’t as high this season (it’s still comfortably the best in the league) but they have actually scored more regularly than in 2021-22.
And when push has come to shove, the defence has been fine. Not exceptional, but still the best in the league and solid in big games; just look at the Champions League run.
Even their defeats — there have been three in the league — have mostly been unfortunate. They didn’t turn up in Augsburg but since lost in Gladbach, where they played over 80 minutes with ten men, and in Leverkusen, who scored their two goals from the penalty spot after (correct) VAR overturns.
Honestly? I think Bayern’s biggest issue is boredom. They concede more than you would expect and they concede early more than you would expect. Bayern have conceded five goals in the first 12 minutes of Bundesliga games this season. Only seven teams — six of them in the bottom half — have conceded more times it the opening 12 minutes of games. You can see that Bayern are there, awake, when it really matters, in the Champions League and in the few league games they are likely to be tested. In those games, when the pressure is on and the opponent is worth some respect, Bayern do not hold back.
After 10 titles in a row you can understand it becoming an issue. Nobody at the club has anything to prove or anything to fight for in Bundesliga matches. When you look at their league performances this year and the two displays against PSG, it’s hard to not to think they’ve only dropped enough points for Dortmund to catch them because they were so far ahead in the first place that they took their foot off of the gas. This shake-up will definitely remove any boredom from the equation: Bayern have a title they will actually have to fight for.
One question is whether or not those ends would justify the means and it feels hard to defend this particular process no matter how the season goes. For Bayern, though, it never matters — they are so dominant that even the prospect of not winning the league is now deemed a sackable offence and they are unlikely to ever pay the price for bad or rash decisions. This shock news just underlines how broken the German football landscape.
The other question, for me, is what happens next? Thomas Tuchel, (in)famously, can be tricky to work with and Bayern is constantly the backdrop for boardroom and dressing room power struggles. It’s hard to imagine this is a happy marriage for very long. But maybe Bayern felt the need to act anyway because, frankly, the pool of elite German-speaking managers is as shallow as it gets.
That’s the only lens I can understand this through. Rightly or wrongly, Bayern will probably fire any coach that ends a season without a trophy and Tuchel is the only real top level German-speaking option out there for them. Flick and Klopp are no-gos and, alongside them, it’s really just Nagelsmann and Tuchel. Were they spooked into action by the latter’s links to Tottenham and Real Madrid and the prospect of having to stick with Nagelsmann even if they didn’t want to?
I still don’t think it justifies this decision. There could be a short-term bump but I don’t see how, mid/long-term, this is a choice that benefits Bayern. But with Uli Hoeneß and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge no longer around, there is a battle to see who now is truly the head of the club and it’s a battle Nagelsmann has lost.
Ten league titles in a row, a couple of coaches have been sacked. Bizarre.