With three consecutive Bundesliga titles and one domestic cup, with another final soon approaching, the average football fan may scoff at the suggestion that Pep Guardiola’s time in Bavaria may have been a failure. It’s something that has certainly divided opinion amongst pundits and professionals, but one that certainly holds some degree of weight.
Though never officially stated by the club, many expected the former Barcelona manager to either surpass or arrive at the heights that Jupp Heynckes’ treble winning side attained, and the fact that he failed to reach a European final has some leaning towards the side of failure.
For starters, Guardiola himself will most likely view his time at Bayern as a failure. He himself stated in numerous interviews and press meetings leading up to the final Champions league game that if Atlético went through the tie, they could literally “kill me”. He has been known to be obsessive in his quest both to implement his iconic style of football and succeed with it, let alone the narrative that surrounds him suggesting that he could never again achieve European glory outside of his native Catalonia.
Respected and intelligent journalists such as Gabriele Marcotti have suggested that even though Guardiola failed to reach the Champions League final in his three years at Bayern, the club and others should still view it as a success because of the status in which the Spaniard has elevated the Bavarian club, both in play style and political positioning.
Though one can obviously see that the ‘Pep System’ has now been fully integrated, doesn’t that go down the drain with his departure? Carlo Ancelotti, brilliant as he may be, is a vastly different manager. Both have enjoyed a myriad of successful campaigns but certainly claim different playing styles in regards to ball possession and player roles.
Whilst Guardiola insists on meaningful possession with a methodical build up, Ancelotti’s most recent displays at Real Madrid were counter attack based, focusing on quick and efficient moves that relied on pace and power. If the system will completely change with the arrival of Bayern’s new manager, then was it really worth all the heartache in order to implement the Guardiola system?
In his early days at the club, Bayern Munich legend Karl-Heinz Rumminegge publicly vocalized his distaste for the way in which he had coached the German giants. Rumminegge went on to criticise the way in which the team had become more obsessed with passing rather than scoring. So despite the club’s more recent public affection for Guardiola, one must remember things weren’t always that way.
Some may suggest that Guardiola’s involvement at Bayern helped the youth at the club, just as it seemingly did when he came through at Barcelona, but how many youngsters did he actually bring through? Joshua Kimmich and Sebastian Rode are two that have excelled towards the end of his tenure, but it is not as if there is a whole team of possession-oriented Bavarians waiting to come through.
Bayern’s prodigal son, Pierre-Emile Højberg, can certainly attest to his lack of involvement at his parent club, and while his inability to break through to the first team may not necessarily come down to Guardiola himself, it is silly to suggest that he has influenced the youth academy in Munich to anything more than a limited capacity.
All that being said, one tends to lean towards the side of failure, but it’s still not that simple. Though there are strong arguments to be made towards that definitive statement of ‘fail or pass’, Guardiola has achieved something great in Bavaria, and it has nothing to do with trophies.
This year we saw the fully fleshed out version of his possession-based monster. One that doesn’t waste possession and play ‘boring’ football, but instead one that dominates games and creates a bevy of chances through intelligent play. We saw a team that was able to play a 3-4-3, 4-3-3, 3-5-2, and a number of different formations. For a single group of players to be that tactically amorphous depending on the situation at hand is nothing short of incredible.
Alas, it is football. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense, and in a lot of cases the best team isn’t always the winner. Amidst this global gravitation towards counter-attacking and pressing football that has supposedly signified the death of possession football, Guardiola has stayed true to his ideals and still achieved relative success with it; some would even say he improved on the system. However, at the end of the day Bayern most likely had an ultimate goal of attaining another European crown, and although the club may still take away the positives from the Spaniard’s time in Bavaria, this game is obsessed with results.
