Tuchel is leaving and Rangnick is coming, with several former Red Bulls already in position amid fan concern
There’s something now. There’s something later. Even as the sweat dried during Bayern Munich’s 2-2 draw with Real Madrid on Tuesday night, the mind began to turn, at an alarming speed, to new projects and new eras. While outgoing Thomas Tuchel analysed the performances of Kim Min-Jae and Leroy Sané in the broadcast area, the more sensible bosses discussed a few metres from their most likely successor: Bayern’s present, its long history and its long trajectory, all on the left. Bumping into each other in a wonderful fiery mess.
The deal with Ralf Rangnick is rarely closed at the time of writing, but it is evidently imminent. Rangnick is said to be enthusiastic, hoping to sign a three-year contract and a seven-figure salary deal with the Austrian Football Association. , where Rangnick is hired as coach of the national team, deserve to be a formality. ” We all know that Ralf Rangnick is an intelligent coach and that he has achieved a lot in his career,” said sporting director Christoph Freund. If it all fits together, then it will be done. “
Meanwhile, Tuchel prepares his team for Saturday’s Bundesliga match in Stuttgart, which can still clinch second place. Next up is the second leg at the Bernabeu on Wednesday, with the final Champions League win at Wembley still on the horizon. Of course, there is an impossible to resist parallel here with 2013, when coach Jupp Heynckes was quietly sent off through a side door even as he was guiding Bayern to a magnificent treble.
Heynckes was so furious when he was told he was going to be replaced by Pep Guardiola that he refused to allow president Uli Hoeness into his apartment in the first place to break the news. And while Tuchel has largely kept diplomatic advice amid feverish speculation about his replacement, there would be a bloodless and satisfying symmetry if Bayern were to win another Champions League crown with a coach they have already had to get rid of.
How did Bayern end up in this position? Guardiola was at least his main target; Rangnick is, at best, a Plan C, drawn up after the departure of Xabi Alonso and Julian Nagelsmann. There was lukewarm communication about Roberto De Zerbi and Hansi Flick, but very temporarily (and somewhat strangely) Rangnick emerged as the overwhelming favourite: one of the best players in the world. The biggest and most successful clubs entrust their long career to a coach who turns 66 next month and has been without a first trophy for thirteen years.
Of course, there’s a slight logic at work here. Bayern are not only preparing for another season, they are rebuilding an entire mainframe. Freund’s arrival from Red Bull Salzburg, where he worked intensively with Rangnick, followed the hiring of Max Eberl as sporting director in March (and no, the difference between sporting director and sporting director has never been fully explained). Like Manchester United, Rangnick’s last assignment at the club, it is an institution that necessarily presses the reset button. Who better to lead the revolution than the guy who made Soft Drink FC a global sports giant?
Well, probably a lot of people. And indeed, among Bayern fans, who have expressed resistance to Rangnick in the days since his candidacy was announced, there is a natural distrust of the rampant comfort drink model, with its sectarian, imperial and expansionist reach. Ahead of last weekend’s attack on Eintracht Frankfurt, some of them unfurled a banner to protest Red Bull’s growing influence at their club. Academy director Jochen Sauer, another alumnus of the Comfort Drink, is a joint youth team with Los Angeles FC called “Red and Gold. “
At the very least, Bayern’s unconditional adherence to the Red Bull lifestyle shows the extent to which the superclub has lost its own concepts and lost its self-esteem. Over time, Bayern’s motto, mia san mia – “we are who we are” – has degenerated into a kind of circular logic, an empty enchantment maintained only through the club’s serial dominance in the Bundesliga. Even now that this has been shattered through Bayer Leverkusen, it turns out that the time has come for revolution. . And so what would it mean if this roster giant won its next two games and took home the biggest prize of all?
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No one really knows. In a way, Tuchel was the logical endpoint of Bayern’s existing model, the winner shown without an explained ideology hired in a desperate attempt to keep the display going for a few more years. Winning the Champions League would not invalidate the justification for their elimination. Nor would it undermine the case for rebuilding the team with a younger, hungrier profile.
But that would be deeply confusing, to say the least; just as allowing a Champions League semi-final to overshadow the imminent arrival of the Austrian national team coach is an abandonment of priorities. Now there’s anything. There’s something later. But rarely has Bayern’s long history coincided so closely with Bayern’s present.