A litany of half-chances and scuffed shots saw Tuesday night's Champions League match end 2-1 in favor of Bayern Munich. It was a Pyrrhic victory. Their European season was over due to the away goals rule. Atlético Madrid had defeated them 1-0 in the first leg and their goal in the second leg secured their progression to the final.
Pep Guardiola was not a failure at Bayern Munich
The best team does not always win the Champions League, and managers just as highly regarded as Guardiola have failed to win the title with better squads.
Bayern will return next year to chase the Champions League title, but they will be under a new manager. Pep Guardiola's time with them is done. He will be branded a failure by many, even if he was anything but.
Guardiola’s German adventure, at least in Europe, ends with a defeat against a Spanish team for the third year running. First Real Madrid, then Barcelona and now Atlético Madrid. Bad things always do seem to come in threes.
Just like the previous two defeats, the tie was lost in the first leg. It’s easy to say in retrospect, but it seemed that Guardiola’s greatest strength -- his ingenuity -- was his biggest weakness each time. Against Real Madrid two years ago, he over-thought matchups and tinkered to the point of perfection, but then beyond it. He dared Real Madrid to beat his team without the ball, and they decimated a defensively suspicious Bayern team on the counter.
Against Barcelona, the threat of Lionel Messi, Luis Suárez and Neymar was so great and frightening that Guardiola also thought that he should starve them of the ball. He pushed extra men forward to conquer the midfield while attempting to hold three of the earth’s best players at bay with three defenders. Barcelona laughed at the tactic and the MSN forward line nonchalantly embarrassed Bayern.
This year, Guardiola ran into an opponent that is the antithesis of his side. Where Bayern love to have the ball, both as an offensive and defensive tactic, Atlético abhors it. They prefer for the opponent to have the ball, to ping it around from side to side and to pin them deeper in their own half. They want the opponent to grow in confidence. To push more men forward and become more ambitious. Then, with the opponent throwing caution to the wind, Atléti strikes on the counter and ends the contest in one swift blow.
That’s how they beat Bayern in the first leg, even if it took a magical Saúl run to complete the narrative.
The second was different, though they managed to score in the same fashion through Antoine Griezmann. Usually it is Atlético's aggressive pressing style, defensive genius and relentlessness combined that keeps the scoreline narrow in their favor; on this occasion it was pure luck. Bayern were at home and had every intent of blowing down the defense, rather than unlocking it. They huffed and puffed and blew it down twice. Once from a Xabi Alonso free kick, the second through an Arturo Vidal knockdown header and Robert Lewandowski nodding in the finish.
They kept huffing and puffing, and Atlético’s sinister possum tactic became a desperate last resort rather than an intentional trap. They couldn’t get a hold of the game, no matter how hard they tried. Bayern had learned their lesson from the first leg. They matched Atlético’s energy and doubled down on their superior passing ability. This was Guardiola’s final chance at European success with Bayern and he had remedied his mistakes from both years and the match prior. He wasn’t playing into his opponent’s hand anymore, he prepared and instructed his team to fully overwhelm Atlético into submission.
Time and luck would run out before Guardiola could be vindicated. After the game, he was surprisingly upbeat:
Guardiola: "We did everything. I'm very proud. That's the reason I was very happy while working in Germany. I told them I'm very proud."
— Alex Truica (@AlexTruica) May 3, 2016
The fact and nature of the defeat won’t stop the obtuse evaluations of his time at Bayern. Guardiola had come into Bayern after a treble-winning season with Jupp Heynckes. He changed the style of play, sold positionally rigid players and brought those who he saw as capable of fitting into his fluid system. He took a side that was as combative and rugged as the Atlético side that he faced -- a blue-collared squad -- and turned them into a collection of white-collared scientists on a football pitch. He won consecutive Bundesliga titles and looks set to win a third. But yet, there’s the sense that he failed in not winning the Champions League.
While the board has said that he wasn’t brought in to do much more than win a particular trophy, a coach with the reputation and salary of Guardiola, in charge of such a powerful Bayern squad, should have won at least one Champions League title. Or at least reached the final itself.
In that respect, it seems that Guardiola is a victim of his own achievements and timing. Coming in after Heynckes’ treble run skewed expectations so wildly that people forgot just how difficult it is to win both the league and the Champions League. After all, Heynckes had lost the Bundesliga to Jürgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund and lost in the Champions League final, at Allianz Arena, to Chelsea the year prior.
From 2000-2013, before Guardiola took over, Bayern had won the league seven out of 13 times. Dominant, sure, but the title had changed hands routinely. Guardiola made Bayern’s capture of it an after thought.
On the subject of the Champions League, Bayern has only won the title twice since the tournament changed formats in 1993. Besides the Heynckes triumph, the only other time was in 2000-2001. Between that time, they were runners-up twice, 2009-2010, 2011-2012, and never made it to the semifinals apart from those times. With Guardiola they reached the semis three times in a row.
The notion of Bayern Munich being a dominant European team is due to what Guardiola built, even without winning the Champions League.
There's also the fact that he won the title twice with Barcelona, which was expected to translate to Bayern. But given that he had Messi, the greatest footballer to ever walk the planet, and two of the best passing midfielders in the history of the sport in Xavi and Andres Iniesta, the expectation had unreasonable foundations from the start. Heynckes won it, but he also had a healthy Franck Ribéry and Arjen Robben -- two wingers who took turns being the third-best player in the world, and who were consistently injured during Guardiola's reign.
Only one manager has ever won the Champions League title more than Guardiola: Carlo Ancelotti. Only one other -- Bob Paisley -- has won the old European Cup more times. Both have three victories over a lifetime of management. Guardiola, managing two teams for a total of six years, has the same amount of medals as Heynckes, Sir Alex Ferguson, José Mourinho and Vicente del Bosque. It’s an incredibly difficult competition to win once, let alone twice, and especially three times. Some managers that are considered all-time greats coached for decades without ever winning the Champions League.
It can’t be denied that Guardiola built a Bayern Munich team entirely capable of winning the Champions League that didn’t. Twice they ran into teams whose talent level decided the matches. The third, they failed to finish their chances. That is a failure. But when put into the grander perspective, that failure is not rare; Guardiola had just overachieved before and gave birth to unrealistic expectations.
The Bayern board have repeatedly emphasized that they brought in Guardiola to help establish the team as a superpower and to build a footballing culture that could last beyond him. He has been successful at that. Bayern are without a doubt one of the best teams in the world, while conquering their own domestic league. Most of the players under Guardiola have improved by leaps and bound, and he’s blooded in many talented youth players.
As he said, he will walk away knowing that he gave his all for the team. His European shortcomings just revealed that more often than not, regardless of the talent and reputation of the manager, their best usually doesn’t mean a Champions League final or a win. If it’s a failure of his, then it’s a damnation of others.
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