After eight in a row for Bayern, what hope is there for the rest?
It ended not with arrogance or effortlessness, but with spirit and defiance. After Manuel Neuer pulled off the lastgasp save from Yuya Osako to prevent Werder Bremen making Bayern Munich wait to be confirmed as champions, the goalkeeper chest-bumped with David Alaba. There was little hint of assumption, give or take the prepared T-shirts with the figure 8 on the chest.
In the all-but-empty stands, Bayern’s CEO Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and president Herbert Hainer briefly ditched the three-seat social distancing protocol to hug in celebration. “Celebrating without fans is difficult,” Robert Lewandowski told Sky after striking the winning goal that sealed an eighth successive Bundesliga title, but the sense of satisfaction was unmistakable.
This Bayern team had been, to quote Süddeutsche Zeitung, “too good for the ghosts”, never looking like they would be knocked off course by the unplanned season hiatus or by the eerie conditions to which they returned in the Geisterspiele. The effort invested, however, was clear. “It was,” in the words of a weary sounding Lewandowski, “a long struggle.”
The Polish striker, his best-ever self just short of his 32nd birthday, didn’t only mean in terms of adapting to a Covid-19 world. Rummenigge, when praising “Hansi Flick, his coaching team and the team, [who] played a brilliant second half of the season”, also talked of “these difficult circumstances” and was referring to the scenario in which Flick initially took the helm after a humiliating 5-1 defeat at Eintracht Frankfurt in early November ended the reign of Niko Kovac.
The numbers since speak for him, dropping just seven points in 24 matches and remaining in strong contention for a treble to mirror that of Jupp Heynckes in 2013, but Flick’s success is about more than that. “It relates not only to our victories, the points and the many goals,” continued Rummenigge, “but also to the way we play.”
It has felt so much more Bayernesque under Flick, appointed over as assistant over Kovac’s head last summer just in case the never-overwhelmingly popular tactician’s stock dropped to the level at which the club was forced to act. After Frankfurt, a month and a day after the 7-2 flaming of Tottenham in the Champions League that falsely convinced the world outside that Bayern were as imperious as ever, that moment was reached.
It was immediately different, and not only because the first Bundesliga game in charge was a 4-0 dismissal of Borussia Dortmund. Flick actually lost two of his first four Bundesliga games in charge, successive defeats to Bayer Leverkusen and Borussia Mönchengladbach, which left the team in seventh and seven points shy of the summit. Bayern are still scratching their heads and wondering how they didn’t win those games, and have made up for it and then some since.
Flick made Bayern recover their majesty by introducing a “more aggressively defined football”, as Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Christoph Kneer put it, with the surety of the elite combined with the hunger of a contender. It has been front-foot, energetic, with the desire and intent to press, all of which is a 180-degree turn from the Kovac era. It was the caution of Flick’s predecessor which made Bayern sitting ducks against Liverpool in last season’s Champions League last 16, a hugely damaging episode from which he never truly recovered.
Precisely because Bayern’s dominance is assumed, and because of his modest public image, it is sometimes assumed that Flick has just been an unobtrusive caretaker, tweaking lightly to return order to the team. That would be to hugely undersell him. There have been some significant changes not just to the team’s sense of purpose, but to the purposing of its individual elements.
Installing Alphonso Davies as his first-choice left-back is the most obvious (and most wildly successful) move, but it’s impossible to look at Davies’ success without examining the redeployment of Alaba as the team’s dominant, left-sided centre-back. The Austrian has been impeccable and before crowd sounds were recently layered on top of spectacles that were too subdued for many, we learned just how much of a constant talker Alaba was and is. He has actively participated in the development of the teenager who arrived as a flying winger. Elsewhere the debate over whether Joshua Kimmich should be used in midfield, as Flick has, or kept at right-back is over.
The restoration of Thomas Müller and Jérôme Boateng as key figures has been another triumph for Flick, who has in turn been rewarded by their excellent form. In their case it is about “mutual trust”, as Kneer says, rather than metamorphosis, which also paved the way for contract extensions for a clutch of players during the shutdown including Müller, Davies and crucially Neuer, the captain whose future at the club was in peril just weeks ago with the two parties poles apart in terms of both length of deal and salary expectation. Flick was snapped up in the same period, signing to 2023.
So where’s the hope for the rest? “The Bundesliga law is that if Bayern wobble, you have to be there,” as Bild’s Matthias Brügelmann wrote, before going on to point out that the real chance for the chasing pack is the wind of change blowing through the Bayern board. With Uli Hoeness having already stepped down and Rummenigge set to follow by the end of next year, the coming months in which “Oliver Kahn and Hasan Salihamidzic can still develop in Rummenigge’s slipstream” are crucial for the future.
Yet if that new start does offer the prospect of some sort of period of transition, the old guard have already done significant planning for what’s next. The emergence of Davies, Kimmich, Leon Goretzka, Serge Gnabry and Kingsley Coman as cornerstones creates the sense that the next generation dreamed of by Rummenigge is already here and is augmenting, with another gifted youngster, Tanguy Kouassi, set to arrive from Paris Saint-Germain.
Bayern had their luck at Weserstadion on Tuesday, notably when Davies aimed a kick at Leonardo Bittencourt that referee Harm Osmers thought only worthy of a yellow card, and VAR didn’t disagree. By the time Davies did receive a second caution, it left Bayern with just the closing 11 minutes of normal time to negotiate with 10 men.
Yet even if Bayern didn’t touch the flowing peaks that they have reached under Flick, the manner of the coronation felt appropriate. It’s been about grit and grind as much as gala performances, and it’s the squad’s hunger under Flick, rather than just their quality, which spells continued anguish for the competition.