A historic defeat in the German Cup

What can a heavy defeat reveal about the environment around a team?

An unexpected result calls into question much that seemed obvious a moment before. After Bayern’s cup defeat to Borussia Mönchengladbach in October 2021, this commentary looks for connections between leadership, communication and cooperation on the pitch.

Robert Lewandowski, the coaching staff and the conditions in which shared patterns of play create confidence are at its centre. The argument expresses a clear authorial position. It invites discussion about responsibility while distinguishing observed actions from assumptions about their causes.

Bayern’s defeat

What caused Bayern’s heaviest defeat in the German Cup?

As is widely recognised, the coaching staff bear the principal responsibility for a team’s successes and failures. Over the past two years, Bayern Munich celebrated the greatest successes in their history, including the Champions League title, with most of the present management and head coach Hansi Flick. During that time, Flick built a team around Lewandowski, Neuer, Kimmich and other leading players that moved in sync and responded to one another. Within his playing system, the players understood and respected each other intuitively, without having to stop and think.

After this highly successful period, Flick left the club and now coaches the German national team. Julian Nagelsmann took over at Bayern. Under him, the team has also achieved excellent results in Germany and internationally. Why, then, this sudden and strange result?

The reality is that several unsettled players were on the pitch that day.

Bayern’s management are not negotiating a contract extension with Robert Lewandowski. This began to make him feel insecure. He then failed to score in five consecutive matches. He complains that his teammates do not pass to him enough — an observation YouNr1 can confirm. Salihamidžić is already discussing potential successors to Lewandowski, such as Haaland. Schweinsteiger says Jorginho should win the Ballon d’Or because, in his view, he deserves it most. Lothar Matthäus’ comments also matter: he believes Lewandowski lacks the major national-team achievements needed to win the award. All these statements have very probably unsettled Lewandowski and negatively affected his performance.

The question remains whether Bayern’s management intended this or whether it simply reflects a lack of empathy. It is worth recalling that, in the ranking of goals scored since 2017, Lewandowski leads with 200, ahead of other global stars: Messi with 168, Ronaldo with 151, Mbappé with 138, Salah with 137 and Benzema with 110.

In any case, it is playing with fire. Every player depends on automatic patterns of play. These are practised in training, but the patterns that really make a difference develop only through regular, active involvement in matches. If Lewandowski is left out of the play in many games, the team may suddenly look for him in a difficult match such as the one against Gladbach and fail to find him, because those automatic connections are missing at that moment.

Whether the club’s leadership are playing Russian roulette with Lewandowski deliberately or through a lack of foresight remains to be seen.

The modest midfield star Joshua Kimmich, until now a role model for thousands of young people, received predominantly fierce criticism for his comments about coronavirus vaccination. It appears that the club’s leadership did not ensure he was properly informed on the subject by qualified experts. He did not perform well in the match either.

Lucas Hernández has recently been occupied with personal matters.

Contract-extension talks with Kingsley Coman and Niklas Süle have not been successfully concluded.

Before the cup match against Borussia Mönchengladbach, Julian Nagelsmann had already overseen many successful Bayern performances. The team were not unbeaten, however: on 3 October 2021, they lost 2–1 to Eintracht Frankfurt in the Bundesliga.

He has brought in several new players. We cannot yet make a final judgement on whether these signings were a good idea. Whether the tendency to become less dependent on Lewandowski will succeed in the long term also remains to be seen.

Nagelsmann himself had contracted coronavirus and could not lead the team during the match. That may also have been decisive. A coach is both the heart and the brain of a team. The coach radiates a crucial energy, and the players pick it up, whether positive or negative. It is fair to say that Nagelsmann normally presents himself as one of the most self-assured coaches in the world. He therefore projects the vital energy that can be worth its weight in gold on the pitch.

But how will he carry himself after his illness? How quickly will he regain the energy he usually radiated beforehand?

Borussia Mönchengladbach also have outstanding players, and their new coach, Adi Hütter, quickly succeeded in building an excellent team.

Almost every player deserves a mention. In this match, however, Breel Embolo stood out in particular.

He was our player of the day too.