Bayern Munich vs Porto: Pressure on Pep Guardiola to produce results in Europe

It was an astonishing question to ask a man who is on the point of winning a second, successive Double, whose team are 12 points clear at the top of the Bundesliga with a goal difference of plus 63. Would Pep Guardiola still be at the Allianz Arena next season?

The coach of Bayern Munich looked supremely relaxed here on Monday, wearing a T-shirt that demanded justice for an Argentine journalist, Jorge Lopez, killed in a suspicious road accident involving Brazilian police during last summer’s World Cup. “My future is to have a day off on Wednesday, to take training on Thursday and, of course, to be here next year,” he said.

And yet there are fault lines visible at Bayern’s training headquarters at Sabener Strasse that came to a head after a disastrous night in Porto last week.

The quarter-finals of this season’s Champions League should have been a staging post on the road to the final in Berlin. Bayern had avoided Barcelona, the two Madrid clubs and the new money of Paris Saint-Germain. The trip to Portugal ought to have been routine. Instead, they found themselves two down inside 10 minutes and were fortunate to have lost the first leg by just a 3-1 margin. They must repair the damage.

As someone who inherited a squad that had just won the treble, Guardiola instinctively understands that domestic success is not enough at Bayern Munich. “I know which club I am at and it is not enough to win the Bundesliga and the Cup,” he said. “Only a treble is enough for a club like Real Madrid, Barcelona or Bayern.”

The problem is that the Praetorian Guard that delivered the treble at Wembley in 2013 and which has reached three European Cup finals since 2010 is ageing. Arjen Robben, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Franck Ribéry and Philipp Lahm are all over the age of 30.

Guardiola has always preferred to have a small squad, partly because it is easier to keep focused and partly because he abhors the confrontation that comes with dropping players. Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s chief memory of Guardiola at the Nou Camp was never being able to have a proper face-to-face discussion with his coach. However, the smaller the squad, the more vulnerable it is to injuries and by the time they left the field at the Estadio do Dragao last week, they were beginning to mount.

Guardiola appeared to blame Bayern’s medical staff, led by Hans Müller-Wohlfahrt, a 72-year-old with long, perhaps unnaturally dark hair, who combined his work at Bayern with being the chief doctor to Germany’s World Cup winning national side. Wohlfahrt’s response was to quit and take his entire team with him.

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His clients have included everyone from Boris Becker to Paula Radcliffe and Usain Bolt. Guardiola felt Müller-Wohlfahrt had been devoting too much time to his private clients. When Lahm was involved in a training-ground injury, Müller-Wohlfahrt was in his office eight miles away.

Guardiola’s training staff had to organise an ambulance to take the Bayern captain to hospital, where he was diagnosed with a broken ankle. For Guardiola, who banned the practice of Bayern’s supporters clubs bringing cakes into the dressing room as a thank you after the gentlest of pre-season friendlies, this was unforgivably lax.

A central figure in this has been Thiago Alcantara, who was Guardiola’s first signing. When asked by the club’s chief executive, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, who he wanted to bring in during the summer of 2013, Guardiola replied: “Thiago or nothing”.

He had known Thiago since the midfielder was a kid at the Barcelona academy, La Masia. His brother, Pere Guardiola, is his agent. When he was injured, he sent him not to Müller-Wohlfahrt but to the man he described as “the best doctor in Europe”, Barcelona’s Ramon Cugat.

This season has seen a direct competition for places between Thiago and Mario Götze, the golden child of Germany’s triumphant World Cup campaign, the man who won the trophy in the Maracana. Guardiola has favoured Thiago and, according to Bayern’s former captain, Lothar Matthäus, he has been right to do so. “The two are miles apart,” Matthäus remarked. When Guardiola was asked about Götze, he replied: “He must do his talking on the pitch, not with journalists, not with his agent or the president.”

Since coming to Munich, April has been Guardiola’s cruellest month. Almost exactly 12 months ago, came what he described as “the fuck up” against Real Madrid in the semi-finals of the Champions League. Just as they did in Porto, Bayern lost the first leg – this time 1-0.

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For the return in the Allianz, Guardiola radically altered his formation. The result was a humiliating 4-0 defeat. Then as now, Bayern were crippled by injuries. Then as now they had not broken sweat domestically and the lack of pressure was starting to show.

When asked why Manchester United were so ineffectual in Europe after winning the European Cup in 1999, Roy Keane pointed to what he called “The Rolex Culture”: domestic self-satisfaction that bred a disastrous complacency whenever United were called to raise their game in the Champions League.

In the days leading up to the Madrid debacle, Guardiola had a similar feeling. During his first season in Bavaria, he gave the Catalan journalist, Marti Perarnau, astonishing access to his innermost thoughts for the book, Pep Confidential. Just before they faced Real, having already won the Bundesliga, he told Perarnau: “I am a complete nobody if I am not at my very, very best. I have so many doubts, I worry about everything and am secure about nothing.

“We thought we were the greatest and our decline started the day we won the Bundesliga and it hasn’t been a gentle decline. We have gone right off the rails. Praise actually makes you weaker. It happens to all of us.”

Bayern may go off the rails tonight. Outwardly Guardiola appeared supremely confident. “A 2-0 win for Bayern would not be the kind of result that would send shockwaves around the world,” said the man whose last Champions League match at the Allianz Arena saw them put seven past Shakhtar. “This is the Champions League and this is one of the reasons you coach a big team, the situation is...wow!”