WAt least Thomas Müller can gain something positive from the big noise at his heart club. “I always think it’s good when something stirs about FC Bayern,” said the club icon on Sunday evening at DAZN. “It means that the club and the players are still interesting enough that they are used for big stories.” Like FC Hollywood reloaded, so to speak.
What happened at the weekend leading up to the important 4-2 (3-1) win at VfL Wolfsburg in Bayern came very close to the turbulence of the Matthäus-Klinsmann-Beckenbauer period in the 1990s. The currently injured captain and national goalkeeper Manuel Neuer massively criticized his own club management in an interview with the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” and “The Athletic”.
First and foremost it was about the separation from his close friend and goalkeeping coach Toni Tapalovic (“I felt like my heart was being ripped out”). But the conflict is obviously deeper and is by no means off the table due to the clear reaction of the club bosses. Neuer’s statements revealed a strained relationship between the captain and the coach at FC Bayern, Julian Nagelsmann was ultimately the driving force behind Tapalovic’s exit. According to a report by “Kickers” (Monday), several teammates also expressed their solidarity with the goalkeeper internally after the interview.
“I wouldn’t have done the interview”
So Nagelsmann’s authority is weakened. Already around the departure of Robert Lewandowski to FC Barcelona there was talk of internal criticism of the goalscorer of the 35-year-old coach. The only thing that helps FC Bayern is success. And that’s why the victory in Wolfsburg was so important and the relief about it so great.
“Victory is above everything,” said Nagelsmann. Or as Thomas Müller put it: “We celebrated a must-win today. We withstood the pressure of having to win.” Otherwise, the serial champions of recent years would have fallen behind 1. FC Union Berlin in the Bundesliga table.
For FC Bayern, however, the following also applies: the work of a coach is no longer measured by winning the umpteenth German championship, but above all by the performance in the Champions League. And there is the worrying thing, less than a week and a half before the round of 16 first leg at Paris Saint-Germain, that Bayern are still a rather shaky entity by their standards.
They allowed 22 Wolfsburg shots on goal on Sunday. Also because of a yellow-red card for Joshua Kimmich (54th), Bayern threatened to miss a game despite a quick 3-0 lead after less than 20 minutes and the 4-1 after a great solo run by Jamal Musiala (73rd). to shake hands “I think that we were very unlucky to lose and that Bayern was lucky to win,” said VfL coach Niko Kovac, who was only allowed to train Munich for a year and a half in 2018 and 2019, although he won the German championship and the DFB with them trophy won.
Nagelsmann is not there yet. But he knows that the dispute between Manuel Neuer and the club management is also a problem for him. “I wouldn’t have done the interview,” Nagelsmann said again after the game. “One passage reads that Bayern Munich is the focus. Completely separate from me, it wasn’t conducive to the club in terms of rest. You can see that from the fact that I now have to answer 16 of 17 questions on the subject.”
One of the questions was whether things would calm down at Bayern after this win. And the trainer replied: “I don’t light anything. So I hope it is.”
Meanwhile, the Wolfsburg coach Niko Kovac praised the performance of VfL Wolfsburg. “I would like to pay my team a huge compliment today. Because we really challenged FC Bayern Munich today,” said the former Bayern coach on Sunday evening at the press conference on the game. “I think we were very unlucky to lose and Bayern were lucky to win. But that’s the difference: they’re world-class. And we still have to work to get there.”
In front of 30,000 spectators in the sold-out Volkswagen Arena, Wolfsburg fell 3-0 down in the first 20 minutes thanks to goals from Kingsley Coman (9th/14th minute) and Müller (19th). “We were 3-0 down with the first two shots. Because Kingsley Coman’s cross was not intended as a shot,” Kovac quarreled.
Jakub Kaminski (44th) brought the “Wolves” to 1:3 and after a yellow-red card for Bayern international Joshua Kimmich (53rd), there were some signs of a turnaround in this game. But outnumbered, Bayern made it 4-1 (73′) thanks to a nice solo run by Jamal Musiala. Mattias Svanberg (81st) only managed one goal.
“Our team never gave up,” said the new sports director Marcel Schäfer at DAZN. But he also criticized the emergence of the decisive fourth goal. “We have to get over our physicality and physique – a fourth goal like that should never happen,” he said. “There were seven or eight of our players where he marched through. But even after the fourth goal, our team never gave up.”
