Neymar and Kylian Mbappé looked closely when Bayern met FC Barcelona in the quarter-finals of the Champions League last August. Thomas Tuchel, then still the coach of Paris St. Germain, had three TVs hung up in the dining room, he wanted his players to look at their possible final opponent. But Neymar and Mbappé belong to that category of footballers who are so convincingly convinced of their own heroism that they basically don’t worry. What if the possible final opponent plays an epoch-making game and wins 8: 2? Anyway, we are Neymar and Mbappé! In addition, on that evening in August, the PSG pros weren’t sure whether they would even meet Bayern in the final. Bayern would still have to defeat Manchester City in the semi-finals, and whether they would make it was very questionable.
How the story continued can be seen in the football history book: Olympique Lyon was kind enough to get Manchester City out of the way for Bayern, and in the end Bayern won the final, against Neymar and Mbappé.
If Neymar and Mbappé were familiar with the history of foreign football clubs, they could now, for once, be afraid. FC Bayern are in the best possible bad shape for the quarter-final second leg in Paris: The mood in Munich is extremely tense, and history shows that Bayern have often drawn their strength from such friction. At least for 90 or 120 minutes.
Flick says sentences that draw a sharp dividing line
However, you will have to scroll through the club history for a while to come across a comparable incident. The assumption is: You will not find anything. A wide variety of comedies, tragedies and tragic comedies have already been performed in the Boulevard Theater on Säbener Strasse, but this plot is likely to be new: There is a trainer who is building a wagon castle on the club’s premises, in which he and his players are demonstratively entrenched – not a new one Idea, admittedly, the trainer Otto Rehhagel built his entire coaching career on this idea. What is new, however, is that the opponent standing outside the wagon castle is not from the media, from Borussia Dortmund or from the DFB. The opponent is your own club.
You don’t have to be in the dressing room and in the corridors of the office to understand the dimensions of the internal disagreements. In the meantime, it is enough to follow the facial expressions and statements of the basically loyal coach Hansi Flick, who has never been seen so profound. Flick does something that coaches actually don’t do before important games: he says sentences that draw a sharp dividing line. Sentences that cannot be interpreted in any other way than: Mia san mia, i.e. the team, the coach and the coaching staff, and mia hold together. And it’s you – this means officials like the sports director Salihamidzic or the honorary president Hoeneß.
It is unclear whether Flick is so annoyed by the lack of internal solidarity that he lets himself be carried away by such sentences; or whether he deliberately pulls out the very last cartridge before the second leg in Paris in order to put the team in an emotional now-especially-state. But one thing is clear: Both variants make it difficult to imagine that Hansi Flick has a future in this club – or: wants to have one.
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