Where now for Pep Guardiola and Bayern Munich?
The coach and the club have been dodging the wrong questions this week as the club was blasted out of the Champions League by a Spanish opponent for the second straight year.
Tuesday’s victory was rendered Pyrrhic from the moment that the Barcelona front three sliced open Bayern’s defense twice in the first half, allowing the Catalan club to rest its important players for other contests to come. It was right for Guardiola and Munich’s chairman, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, to say that their team went out with dignity against “probably the best side in the world.”
Though Barcelona did not rout Bayern in its own arena as Real Madrid did a year ago in the tournament, this contest was over long before Luis Enrique, Guardiola’s eventual successor at Barça, took off Luis Suárez, Ivan Rakitic and Andrés Iniesta to save energy for the battles ahead. Lionel Messi was already by then taking his own rest and virtually sleepwalking through the second half in the Allianz Arena.
That Robert Lewandowski refused to surrender without scoring a magnificent goal augurs well for the German champion. However, behind the sportsmanlike smiles and congratulations, missing out on a Champions League final in Berlin will hurt Munich, and deeply.
There is work, big rebuilding work, to be done with Bayern.
So when Guardiola was cornered by the media on Monday and asked about rumors that he is wanted by Manchester City, his response was not the full answer. “I’ve already said 200 million times,” he said, “I’ll be here next season. That’s it. I have a year left on my contract.”
That is not even half the question of what Bayern needs to know. The team against Barcelona was gutted by injuries, most importantly to its flying wingers, Arjen Robben and Franck Ribéry. But it was also without the key defenders David Alaba and Holger Badstuber, and aches and fatigue also affected some who did play, like Xabi Alonso, Philipp Lahm and Bastian Schweinsteiger.
The Germans among those players deny themselves the excuse that the Champions League semifinals they lost last year and this year sandwiched an event that was just as important to them, and arguably more so: the 2014 World Cup.
Age is becoming a factor to the German club, too. Six from the Bavarian team — which peaked two years ago when it won the treble of the Champions League, the Bundesliga and the German Cup in the same season — are now over 30. That need not be a terminal age for a player today, thanks to improved medical and dietary care and rosters that are large enough to rotate star players.
However, Ribéry and Robben may never again reach the peak they did in 2013 under Jupp Heynckes’s final season as coach. Ribéry is 32 now and Robben is 31. Alonso is 33, Lahm 31, and dear old Schweinsteiger, though only just 30, looks what he is — a ferocious competitor who has pushed himself through countless knocks and strains while playing for both club and country.
Players will always be the last to call time on their own splendid careers at the top. Coaches and club officials have to do that for them, and Matthias Sammer, the sporting director who sits alongside Rummenigge, is fully aware that the future will not take care of itself without the club intervening in those careers and then either buying new players or promoting replacements from the club’s academy.
This is where the question asked of Guardiola is insufficient.
It should not be whether he intends to see out the final year on his contract, but whether he is prepared right now to sign up for at least another three years. Whoever chooses the players to invest money in must be committed beyond the next immediate term, and if Guardiola is to have a major say in recruitment, then Bayern needs to know his intentions.
The decisions are pressing, and it is now that Bayern Munich must be feeling the absence of Uli Hoeness. He was the man who two years ago pursued and persuaded Guardiola to leave his yearlong sabbatical in New York and come to Munich.
Hoeness, an executive with the club since 1979 and its president from 2009 to 2014, had worked hand in hand with Rummenigge to make their club omnipotent in Germany, but he was jailed last year for tax fraud and is still serving time, though he has been granted work-release privileges.
So it falls to Rummenigge and to Sammer to plot the future. They say they trust in Guardiola, even if his mission to change the style of play employed under Heynckes is, at best, an unfinished project.
In part, the problem is that Bayern does not have to be the best in Europe to win the German league. With Borussia Dortmund having stumbled — brought down by Munich’s ability to lure or, if necessary, buy Dortmund’s finest players — the next-closest team has routinely been 15 points off the pace in challenging Bayern in the Bundesliga this season.
Even with that domestic dominance, and the option it afforded Guardiola to rotate a large squad, the injuries of the past season mounted intolerably. Barcelona, by contrast, was forced last summer to recruit more stars than it possibly needed because of a looming embargo in the following two transfer windows that was imposed by FIFA.
Barcelona is fit and healthy and has players to spare in the run-up to the Spanish and Champions League titles. Luis Enrique doesn't say much outside of what he is obligated to in answering questions from reporters, but one thing he did permit himself to say on Tuesday was this: “We can still win every competition we are in.”
