PERHAPS the most telling sign that Bayern had veered badly off course last week is that only once since the creation of the Bundesliga in 1963 had they sacked a manager before December. That was Jupp Heynckes in 1991 (who, of course, would come back years later and win the treble) and he was coming off four straight defeats.
Carlo Ancelotti, who left the club on Thursday, is gone after one defeat (away to Paris St Germain) and a disappointing home draw (enabled by a grotesque blunder from his reserve goalkeeper). Prior to that, Bayern had won six out of seven matches, scoring 20 goals and conceding three.
Last season, he won the Bundesliga, lost a German Cup
semi-final his team dominated, and went out against Real Madrid in the Champions League quarter-final after extra time (and two offside goals).
So the “results business” brigade can sit this one out. He has not gone because of results. Rather, as club supremo Uli Hoeness suggested, he was moved on because of performances, because a group of players (five, he says) were against him and because his brand of football was outdated and training sessions were antiquated, low-intensity affairs.
Fine. Bayern are doing what many clubs do: getting their narrative into the mainstream and establishing it as fact. The same thing happened with Louis van Gaal and Jurgen Klinsmann when they were sacked. You can pin it on players losing faith, especially when you don’t name names; after all, who is going to come out and say it was them? You can talk about training methods that are passe; who’s going to check? And you can call his tactics outdated because, well, that’s subjective.
Maybe Bayern are right. But, if they are, it raises an important question. Ancelotti has been a top-flight manager for more than two decades. Surely they knew what they were getting when they hired him to replace Pep Guardiola in 2016? And, if they didn’t, if his prehistoric tactics and training methods and bad man-management only became evident once he was there, why did it take so long for them to realise and act? Why not sack him in the summer? Why wait until late September?
The answer, you suspect, has less to do with Ancelotti and more to do with the dysfunctionality at the club. Once the epitome of long-term planning and solid stewardship, clearly something has gone badly wrong. You can’t help but wonder if part of it is the tension of having two men at the top – Karl-Heinz Rummenigge (a staunch Ancelotti cheerleader) and Hoeness (who was sharply critical) – pulling in different directions. All of it juxtaposed against the background of a squad needing to transition – Phillip Lahm and Xabi Alonso have retired, Frank Ribery and Arjen Robben are well into their 30s, Arturo Vidal and Robert Lewandowski are perpetually the object of transfer speculation – without a unified plan of which way to go.
And, as Lewandowski noted in an interview last month, it played out in a summer when Europe’s top clubs spent £50 million or £100m on players. Bayern, to be fair, did break their transfer record this summer: they forked out £39m on Corentin Tolisso. Which, in some ways, adds insult to injury. Here is a club who are among the four richest in the world, yet there are some 20 teams around the world whose club record is higher.
It is hard to escape the notion that Ancelotti’s sacking, or, at least, the timing, is a proxy for deeper issues between Rummenigge and Hoeness and decisions they made, or failed to make, in the past years, particularly when it comes to handling veteran players. Neither is going to step aside, so in the end Ancelotti was the most convenient fall guy.
But the problem won’t go away. What they need is a clear vision, one that goes beyond packing the club with former players (Hasan Salihamidzic, with no prior experience beyond TV punditry, is now the director of football; Willy Sagnol, who had a controversial and unsuccessful 18-month stint at Bordeaux, has taken over from Ancelotti). And chasing the latest flavour-of-the-month manager, such as Hoffenheim’s 30-year-old wunderkind Julian Nagelsmann or Thomas Tuchel (who left Borussia Dortmund due to “personality clashes” with the board, which doesn’t exactly bode well at a club like Bayern).
AT the risk of sounding like an inveterate old-timer, the contrast between Sergio Aguero and Eric Brook, the man whose Manchester City goal-scoring record he will most likely equal and break when he returns from injury, is just too tempting.
Both were prolific strikers who roamed the front line. Both suffered injuries in car accidents.
Brook was on his way to play for England and Scotland in a war-time international: the crash fractured his skull and led to his retirement.
Aguero was taking a cab to the airport in Amsterdam to catch a private jet back to Manchester after attending a concert on his day off when the cab spun out of control and hit a pole. It won’t cost him his career – he ended up breaking a rib – but it will cost him several league games (including yesterday’s trip to Stamford Bridge) and Argentina’s crucial World Cup qualifiers.
It’s obviously a sign of how things have changed that someone like Brook, on the maximum wage at the time, probably could not even imagine commercial air travel, let alone hopping on a private jet on a day off to travel to another country, whereas Aguero’s boss, Pep Guardiola, defended his striker’s decision.
Guardiola says he is not the police and players are free to do what they like on their days off. It’s a grown-up attitude, certainly more so than those pundits who made a big deal out of the fact that Aguero “left the country”… as if car accidents can’t happen in Manchester.
That said, you do wonder about somebody’s focus when they travel out of town for a concert less than 48 hours before their club’s biggest game of the season.
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