Top of the Bundesliga and unbeaten, Bayern Munich seem improved from the team they were under Thomas Tuchel. Yet the Champions League has been a chastening experience, with Vincent Kompany suffering a bad defeat to Aston Villa (1-0) and a humiliating one to Hansi Flick’s Barcelona (4-1).
The results show that Bayern remain a team under construction. Kompany is three months into his tenure at Sabener Strasse and inherited a team with flaws in several positions. There have been positives, including that domestic record — which continued with a thumping 4-0 win over Mainz in the DFB-Pokal on Wednesday — and Michael Olise’s immediate impact, which has far exceeded expectations. But there have been negatives, too, especially concerning the defence, the resilience of the midfield and the dependability of the team’s pressing work.
The data suggests that Bayern are healthy. They are comfortably the Bundesliga’s highest scorers (29 from eight games), even if they are over-performing their expected goals by a greater margin than any team in the division (+6.78 xG). Without the ball, only RB Leipzig (three) and Union Berlin (four) have conceded fewer goals, and Kompany’s team have allowed their opponents the lowest combined xG in the Bundesliga.
So, Bayern are scoring goals, creating good chances, and conceding very few. The chart below better contextualises where they are relating to the last few seasons, showing rolling 10-game xG averages — for and against — since the beginning of the 2021-22 season.
The conclusions are clear: Bayern are not what they were, but they are clearly improving, in and out of possession.
Aesthetically, they can be mechanical. Kompany’s football is repetitive in nature and predicated on repeating sequences. Nevertheless, within that framework there are interesting observations to make, all of which are a cause for encouragement.
Jamal Musiala is being used more often in deeper positions, as a carrying and passing playmaker with a broader remit. He is also managing to get into scoring positions more regularly than before and with seven goals in all competitions already, is on course to record his most prolific season (16 in 2022-23).
In midfield, Joshua Kimmich has been restored to what he believes is his best position: the deep-lying No 6 role. Defensively, there have been lapses and issues. In the attacking sense, though, Kimmich has helped rejuvenate Serge Gnabry and Kingsley Coman. One of Bayern’s ‘automatisms’ (rehearsed moves) under Kompany is to push Kimmich to the right of the defence, almost to the touchline, from where he can whistle a pass across the pitch, towards (most often) an unguarded Gnabry. It’s a nice idea and it has worked well.
Further forward, Olise has been a revelation. His success might seem inevitable in hindsight, but a lot of work has evidently gone into adapting him and Bayern around one another. Olise is regularly able to receive possession in the positions he enjoys — typically between the touchline and the penalty box, high on the right side — but is being rotated into all sorts of other areas, too: as a No 10, sometimes as a more orthodox winger, often as a crossing or passing target inside the box.
Five goals and two assists in the league alone is a better return than most could have imagined.
Olise has started well at Bayern (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
Bayern are emphasising more positional fluidity as a team. There has also been a big push on individual training, during which the level of instruction — from Kompany and his staff — has been popular and appreciated. The depth of the video analysis has been welcomed, too, especially among the younger players, and that has been reflected in the form of not just Musiala, but Aleksandar Pavlovic as well, who began the season well before breaking his collarbone in October.
But if the Bundesliga has provided Kompany with an encouraging start, and a place to show new ideas, the Champions League has shone a harsher light on his Bayern.
The defeat to Villa showed a propensity to play too slowly in attack to break through disciplined defences. That evening, as against Bayer Leverkusen a few days before, Bayern had great difficulty penetrating the box. Nine of Bayern’s 17 shots at Villa Park came from outside the box. Against Leverkusen, 13 of 18 were from distance. When opponents with high-quality defenders are content to sit deep, Kompany’s attack does find it difficult to manufacture high-percentage chances — especially for Harry Kane, with whom they are not always finding the right positional balance. Kane’s shots per 90 minutes have dropped slightly from last season, down from 4.6 to 4.0.
The season’s low point was the defeat to Barcelona defeat and that highlighted a different set of problems.
As with many recent Bayern defeats, it provoked plenty of criticism of the defence, especially of Kim Min-jae and Dayot Upamecano, the two centre-backs. Can they play together? Are they individually good enough? Internally, Bayern are more positive about those two than many in the German media. One of the reasons, perhaps, is that their weaknesses are being exposed by a team-wide issue and the inability to balance their counter-pressing with team security.
Raphinha’s first goal, scored inside a minute, was a pertinent example. The flaws in the positioning of the two centre-backs are easy to notice from the screenshot. Kim pushes high on Robert Lewandowski and prevents him from passing forward. Upamecano is looser and later to react to Fermin Lopez, but still unlucky to not make an interception. Clearly, Kimmich should cut out the through ball, too.
It was a sequence of unfortunate events which did not flatter anybody.
But the real culprit was a botched press earlier in the move. As shown below, a trio of Bayern players pincer towards the ball, but without taking away the passing angle that allows Barcelona their exit.
The effort is right, but the execution is not. Barcelona then move up the pitch into oceans of space, compelling the defensive players to make critical (and bad) decisions.
It’s the kind of problem you would expect to find under a new coach, especially when fresh combinations are being formed in different parts of the pitch. It’s not a coincidence, either, that Raphael Guerreiro, playing on his less-favoured right side, was one of the players who misjudged the angle. Instead of a high turnover and an early dose of momentum, Bayern were quickly a goal behind in the game and on their way to a humbling defeat.
It’s not just the case, either, that Barcelona were talented enough to exploit that problem; this issue has been apparent many times. The sequence below comes from the Villa game and shows how a turnover in the attacking penalty box resulted, within seconds, in Kim being punished for an aggressive attempt at a tackle, and three covering Bayern players then running back towards their goal, unable to watch the ball.
It’s not just a flaw that appears in the Champions League, either. Four days after the defeat to Villa, Bayern drew 3-3 against Eintracht Frankfurt. Two of the three goals conceded, including the 94th-minute equaliser, resulted from turnovers and displaced defenders making desperate runs against rapid forwards.
Last weekend, Kompany’s side recorded a comprehensive 5-0 win over lowly Bochum, who are yet to win a league game all season. Still, even Bochum manufactured this situation early in the game, after evading a Bayern press and exiting much too easily down the left.
Such a situation might be the price for trying to control possession and territory. At their historical best, though, Bayern have balanced that with the ability to lock their opponents in their own halves.
And there are other issues at work. Joao Palhinha has been slower to adjust to the Bundesliga than Olise and has not yet been able to provide the security he was bought to add. Injuries to Sacha Boey, Kompany’s first-choice right-back, as well as to Pavlovic and Musiala, have all been disruptive. Manuel Neuer hasn’t been himself in goal, either. During the treble-winning 2019-20 season, he saved 74.5 per cent of the shots he faced. In the current Bundesliga season, that has fallen to 57.1 per cent.
Some of the problems can be solved in time. Others, such as Neuer’s succession and the need to still improve this team in key areas, are more complicated. Nevertheless, none feel quite as significant as Bayern’s tendency to leave themselves exposed. They are pressuring teams without actually subduing them properly and, for now, that is detracting from the progress they are making.
(Top photo: David Inderlied/picture alliance via Getty Images)
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