Bayern Munich are at peace with being ‘only’ second – how long will it last? – The Athletic

Bayern Munich playing only second fiddle in the Bundesliga table as well as in the German football news cycle would have been an intolerable way to spend Christmas for the self-obsessed Bavarians in most seasons. But this year, it’s markedly different.

A rare, peaceful quiet has descended on Munich.

Bayern’s serenity, despite a four-point gap to league leaders Bayer Leverkusen (albeit with a game in hand), is based on new-found confidence that the team have at last moved past the horrific fluctuations in performance that had plagued them for the best part of three years.

They did, embarrassingly, get knocked out of the DFP Pokal by third-division Saarbrucken in November, lose 5-1 at Eintracht Frankfurt in the league a month later and were also beaten 3-0 in the Super Cup by RB Leipzig back in August, sure. The first two of those were freak results, however, and overall, progress is undeniable. In the Bundesliga, goals per game are up (3.3, compared with 2.7 for the whole of last season) and goals against are down (1.0 vs 1.1), and they also navigated a trickier-than-expected Champions League group, containing Manchester United, Galatasaray and FC Copenhagen, with minimal fuss, dropping just two points.

If it wasn’t for a sublime, unbeaten first half of the season by Leverkusen, they’d be out of sight in the league already. That’s a pretty big “if”, granted. But one doesn’t sense the nervousness that a similar run by, say, Borussia Dortmund might have brought out.

It’s not that Bayern don’t view the challenge from Xabi Alonso’s team with the seriousness it deserves. But they believe that history and their own steady form are both on their side, feeling quietly hopeful that Leverkusen, a club infamous for their jitters in title races, will simply not keep up that nigh-perfect record until May.

Talking of Dortmund, it is they, not Bayern, who have dominated headlines going into the winter break.

An awful 1-1 draw with Mainz in their final fixture left Edin Terzic in a sorry fifth place and on the edge of dismissal. His Dortmund bosses decided to keep the 41-year-old but he’s been seemingly emasculated by the arrival of former players Nuri Sahin and Sven Bender as new assistant coaches. Having possible replacements as members of your backroom staff is unlikely to make a happy working environment for Terzic.

There hasn’t been as much drama and intrigue in Westphalia since Thomas Tuchel’s acrimonious dismissal in 2017.

By sharp contrast, it’s been a long time since newspapers lustily reported on tensions between manager and board in Munich.

Club sources — speaking on condition of anonymity to protect relationships — say working with head coach Tuchel has indeed become a lot more pleasant in recent weeks. They say the 50-year-old appointed last March has struck a much happier figure than at the beginning of the season and appears far less impatient about transfer window additions. The peace might not last — it rarely does at Bayern — but it’s worth making the point that you’d have to go back five years, to Jupp Heynckes’ third and final spell in the dugout, for a winter break that didn’t see club and manager at significant odds with each other.

While Max Eberl coming in as a board member for sport does have the potential to change power dynamics at the level above Tuchel in months to come, the former Borussia Monchengladbach and RB Leipzig official’s arrival has been signposted for so long that there’s relatively little public interest in that debate at the moment.

Lastly, following their lapsed sponsorship deal with Qatar Airways, Bayern will not spend their mid-winter training camp in Doha but in Portugal. The end of that long-running controversy, which has occupied activist fans and the media each winter, further explains the unusual calm in the Bavarian capital at the moment.

But behind the scenes, there’s much work to be done.

Centre-back Kim Min-jae going to the Asian Cup with Jurgen Klinsmann’s South Korea and Noussair Mazraoui’s involvement with Morocco at the concurrent Africa Cup of Nations will further increase the burden on a razor-thin back line. Last-minute errors in the summer window saw Bayern head into the season with only three senior centre-backs, necessitating the emergency deployment of midfielder Leon Goretzka there at times.

Despite injuries and a constant need to shuffle the back four, the defence has performed better than anticipated but Bayern have no choice but to strengthen over the next four weeks.

Their well-documented preference is to bring in Ronald Araujo, who can play both central defence and at right-back, but a big transfer fee and Barcelona’s reluctance to let him go might force them to look elsewhere. Tuchel and sporting director Christoph Freund recently hinted at bringing in two or three specialist players to provide depth if Bayern cannot find one high-class addition able to address a multitude of problem positions.

The shortness of time will make even this lesser preferred option hard to pull off. It is critical to Bayern’s chances in the league and in Europe —where a last-16 appointment with Italy’s Lazio looms in February and early March — that the highly-rated Freund will hit the jackpot in his first transfer window since being appointed in September.

Tuchel’s clamour for a defensive midfielder — “a holding six,” as he’s called the role — has somewhat receded, however. Neither Goretzka nor Joshua Kimmich quite fulfil the job criteria of a deep-lying controller according to the manager’s wishes, but training pitch exercises designed to instil more positional discipline and proximity between the two Germany internationals have begun to bear fruit.

In Konrad Laimer, Jamal Musiala and Raphael Guerreiro, Tuchel has alternative options for the centre who aren’t natural holding midfielders either but possess enough quality to make it work. Most encouraging of all in that respect, though, has been the development of 19-year-old Aleksandar Pavlovic. The youngster was a revelation as a starter in the crucial 3-0 win against Stuttgart two weeks ago, when Goretzka and Kimmich were absent through illness.

Pavlovic (Ronny Hartmann/AFP via Getty Images)

“We are not surprised, because Alex was already strong in training last season,” Tuchel said, “we know exactly what he can do.” Pavlovic’s emergence, which has pleased the board no end and demonstrated the coach’s willingness to promote youth players, makes it likelier that Bayern will look at a defensive midfielder on loan this month, if at all.

Up front, things are as good as they possibly could be.

Leroy Sane is having a wonderful season, although he should have scored a few more goals, and Serge Gnabry is struggling for fitness and form. But those are the only negatives in a season that has seen summer signing Harry Kane’s goals and overall impact render any concerns about Bayern’s attacking output academic. The England captain has improved everybody around him, worked incredibly hard to help out when they don’t have the ball and has also enabled Tuchel’s side to be much more effective on the break.

All that’s missing for more sustained dominance is better build-up play that can withstand pressure from high-class opposition and give them more control in possession. Here, too, progress has been visible in recent weeks.

If this all paints a rather rosy picture for the serial champions’ prospects of a 12th straight title, seasoned observers know that they are of course only ever one draw away from another meltdown of sorts.

But as long as they can bask in Kane’s halo and solve their squad deficiencies, Bayern are on course to do considerably better than their 2022-23 season of chaos, when still they won the Bundesliga again despite being pretty awful and were only beaten by eventual winners Manchester City in the Champions League.

All things told, it doesn’t bode too badly as we enter 2024.

(Top photo: Ronny Hartmann/AFP via Getty Images)