The flowers were really beautiful. So beautiful that they could probably have made every mother in Munich and the surrounding area happy with them this Sunday, because they were not too big, but not too small, not too colorful, but not too green either. But the flowers were intended for an employee of FC Bayern Munich, who, flowers or not, is likely to leave this football club a little disappointed.
On Sunday evening, when the FC Bayern footballers played in their stadium for the last time this season, Max Eberl, the sports director, stood on the sidelines with this beautiful bouquet of flowers and waited for the stadium announcer Stephan Lehmann to thank the man for who the flowers were: namely for Bouna Sarr, the Senegalese-French full-back, who has been in Munich since late summer 2021 and has only been allowed to play 33 times since then.
Anyone who has ever been to a Bundesliga stadium during these weeks of the season knows that flowers are given away and employees say goodbye. That’s what they did in Munich this Sunday. They thanked Sarr and Eric-Maxim Choupo-Moting (who was unable to attend because he was ill). And yet at that moment the first people were surprised that Eberl was only holding a bouquet of flowers in his hands, when there was a particularly important employee who will no longer be working in Munich next season.
What happened to the coach? What happened to Thomas Tuchel?
“No, we’re not saying goodbye to our coaching team today because the season isn’t over yet,” said Lehmann – and then didn’t explain why that applied to the coach but not to the players.
But you shouldn’t think that Bayern did this because they might want to keep Tuchel as coach. That doesn’t fit with the fact that the Hansi Flick option is suddenly no longer as unimaginable as it was from both sides a few days ago. And that doesn’t fit with the fact that the “Bild” newspaper reported on Sunday that Eberl would be very committed to Roberto De Zerbi, Brighton’s coach.
On Sunday, Tuchel was on the sidelines – and in the Bundesliga duel with VfL Wolfsburg he started 19-year-old Lovro Zvonarek for the first time. In the fourth minute he made it 1-0. In the 13th minute, Leon Goretzka made it 2-0. And from a sporting perspective there was nothing more to say about Thomas Tuchel’s final home game as coach of FC Bayern.
