Ten titles in succession but Bayern Munich are wracked by uncertainty
It had all the hallmarks of a title celebration. The freshly-minted commemorative T-shirts, the streams of flying beer, the full stadium (for the first time in an Allianz Arena edition of this fixture for two-and-a-half years), beating opponents of name to finish the job and the rest.
This was historic, as Bayern Munich secured a 10th successive Bundesliga title. Yet it felt strangely empty, a sensation that couldn’t wholly be put down either to the recent dumping out of the Champions League or just plain old overfamiliarity.
Not even conquering Borussia Dortmund, the rivals who arguably started it all, drawing Bayern’s best ever years from them with their nerve in capturing straight titles under Jürgen Klopp, could help to shake the circle of doubts that dog the Rekordmeister right now.
On the pitch those start with their top scorer, the man whose 33rd league goal of another extraordinary season just before half-time set Bayern on an inexorable course to fulfilling their Saturday night destiny. Yet his postmatch thoughts were opaque, rather than particularly triumphant. “It’s not that easy for me, what’s going on,” Robert Lewandowski told Sky after the match, where the traditional beer showers – one of which, from Thomas Müller, drenched Bastian Schweinsteiger as he performed his pitchside duties for US television – couldn’t wash away the questions currently nagging at Bayern on all levels.
“Something will happen soon,” Lewandowski added of his contract situation, with Barcelona persistently credited with an interest, while declining to be drawn on what that something would be.
It appears the issue, perhaps more than the potential of Lewandowski having an itch to scratch in terms of one last career challenge, is Bayern’s reticence to extend his contract beyond an extra year given the expense involved. Given his career-best form in the last few years, improving as he moves further into his mid-30s, the striker has every right to feel underwhelmed by the club’s position. His directing of the questioner to “ask the club” whether they wanted to him to stay was not his first instance of doing so).
With sporting director Hasan Salihamidzic categorically ruling out selling him in the summer as a guest on Sky90 on Sunday morning the possibility of Lewandowski leaving as he arrived, walking for free in 2023, cannot be ruled out. The other two thirtysomethings in a similar contractual situation, Müller and Manuel Neuer, nailed their own colours to the mast with their words, with Neuer the final player on the pitch saluting the fans after the party moved to the changing room.
There is little doubt over Julian Nagelsmann being the man to take them forward, despite that exit to Villarreal. “It wasn’t the easiest year,” he said with some circumspection, putting into perspective the journey so far, the standards required and the future. The coach is aware that his debut season saw him “allowed to experiment and settle in,” as Kicker’s Karlheinz Wild put it, and that the margins for error will only get tighter from here. He may be the second youngest coach to win the Bundesliga – after Matthias Sammer with Dortmund in 2002 – but he is no greenhorn, and fully attuned to what it means to be Bayern coach.
Nagelsmann also shrewdly noted that the manner of Saturday’s coronation, beating the nearest Bayern have had to domestic rivals in the last decade “puts the season in a better light”. On a cosmetic level there was a pleasing amount of resistance, with
Dortmund starting briskly and mounting a passable attempted comeback at the start of the second half, with Emre Can cutting the deficit with a penalty while another spot-kick should probably have followed when Benjamin Pavard clumsily clipped at Jude Bellingham. Referee Daniel Siebert later said that, on reflection, “a penalty would have been the correct decision”.
Yet Bayern’s three gift-wrapped goals in this game – Serge Gnabry’s scintillating finish for the opener notwithstanding – underlined that Niklas Süle and Freiburg’s Nico Schlotterbeck can’t arrive soon enough for Dortmund. They should not be the end of the rebuild. Bellingham is an exhilarating footballer, and is likely to be joined in midfield by another English teenager, Jamie Bynoe-Gittens, who made his second first-team appearance as a substitute and appears to be a big part of Marco Rose’s plans. But their best midfielder being an 18-yearold, however prodigiously talented he might be, is an issue. It is not only Bayern stepping into a realm of uncertainty and if they have questions to answer in the coming months, there are at least as many to be directed at BVB.
Bayern’s title-winning winning margins in the past decade – with this season yet to finish and the champions currently 12 points clear, only one of their run of titles was won by a singlefigure points gap – are not solely down to the Munich giants’ lofty standards in that time. After another secondplaced season that has severely disappointed, Rose and Dortmund in particular will spend the summer under scrutiny as they attempt to find a way to challenge credibly post-Erling Haaland. While Bayern’s uncertainty certainly exists, the best of the rest must move swiftly to dispel theirs to even threaten to break the hegemony.
Talking points
The most thrilling game of the weekend was Freiburg’s game against Borussia Mönchengladbach, with Christian
Streich’s side in with a chance of a snaring an improbable top-four finish. At the end of the week in which they reached the DfB Pokal for the first time, they trailed 2-0 early on but turned it around to lead via Philipp Leinhart’s towering header, only for Lars Stindl to snatch a 93rd-minute equaliser for Gladbach. Streich admitted his players were “totally devastated” but made his pride in them clear. “If I was a fan and this team stayed together,” he said, “I’d buy a season ticket for the next two years.”
Had Stindl not scored Freiburg would be level on points with the other Pokal finalists, fourth-placed Leipzig, who planted a rare mis-stepin the Domenico Tedesco era in losing at home by Union. Goals by Sven Michel and Kevin Behrens turned the game in the last five minutes, putting the Berliners, who are sixth, within four points of the Champions League places. Leverkusen’s 4-1 at Greuther Fürth put them back into third and relegated the hosts.
There’s breathing space at the bottom for Hertha, with a 2-0 win over Stuttgart in Berlin – a fine volley from Davie Selke set them on the way – putting Felix Magath’s side four points clear of the playoff spot-occupying Swabians. “We started well in the first five minutes,” admitted Magath, “but I don’t know if anyone should be euphoric.” Stuttgart’s sporting director Sven Mislintat expressed his anger, calling the first 30 minutes “one of our worst games of the season”.
Two of the league’s most reliable goalscorers hit the headlines too – Max Kruse’s first-half hat-trick helped Wolfsburg to a much-needed win over Mainz, while Anthony Modeste could be in hot water despite his strike to set Köln on the way to victory over Arminia Bielefeld He celebrated by throwing a bag of his own brand of coffee into the crowd and is now the subject of a DFB investigation.