When Thomas Tuchel joined Bayern in Munich less than a year ago, predecessor Julian Nagelsmann had left him with every chance of winning the title, and Tuchel had squandered two of them after less than four weeks: Champions League and DFB Cup – not a perfect debut for the bearer of hope.
Now, ten months later, things don’t look much better for Tuchel and his ambitious record champions: out of the DFB Cup, behind before the second leg of the Champions League round of 16, in the championship: eight points behind the enviably confident factory club from Leverkusen. The 2021 world coach is about to walk out again.
The crisis at FC Bayern Munich is entering its next week, and the reporting about it has taken on the sound as if the welfare and woe of the German fatherland depends on the club’s sporting success – although many football fans, if not the vast majority, are probably the joy of the series winner’s tumbling outweighs the joy.
Because finally, after all the years in which the Bundesliga championship only boiled down to the question of when exactly FC Bayern would become champions – perhaps as early as mid-March or as late as April – a competition is returning that also deserves its name.
Yes, of course: the trophy hasn’t been awarded yet, Bayer can still remain runners-up and Bayern can still win the Champions League. But since the club’s former giants such as Uli Hoeneß and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge withdrew, the club has slowly but surely shrunk to normal levels – despite record transfer spending of almost 190 million euros this season.
Coach Tuchel, the difficult one, does not have a super top team at his disposal, but rather an injury-prone ensemble of poorly motivated individual experts. Bayern are not the first team that he leads into a sporting dead end despite huge potential. It’s stupid for the club, but a blessing for the supposedly broken Bundesliga and the fans.
