Fear no factor as Guardiola steps into the Munich lane

Pep Guardiola is back on the treadmill. A Spaniard who took a year’s sabbatical after winning 14 trophies in four years with Barcelona, he is now holding a retreat in the Dolomites in northern Italy.

His new players speak a different language. But Bayern Munich, too, has swept all before it at every level of German and European soccer.

“It would be arrogant,” Guardiola said in German, “to talk about the start of a new era. I will try to continue with the high-level game that Jupp Heynckes achieved. You don’t need to be changing a lot of things in a team that has just won every title.”

Guardiola paused, appearing to marshal in his mind his next words in a language he had studied over the past six months in New York, where he and his family had taken time out from the competitive stresses he has known principally in his native Catalonia.

“I am a bit nervous,” he said at his introductory news conference in Munich last week. “Everyone has their opinions about playing football. Bayern have won everything; during my time as coach at Barcelona, we won everything, so it’s normal there will be interest.”

“Interest” would be an understatement in any language. “It will only be little things we will be changing,” Guardiola added, “really tiny.”

His news conference was followed by another introducing Mario Götze, the playmaker whom Bayern had just paid $47.5 million to buy from Borussia Dortmund. Again, deference.

“I’m sure I can develop here,” the 21-year-old Götze said. Intriguingly, Matthias Sammer, the sport director at Bayern, let it slip that Götze and his consummate adaptability and invention with the ball had been discussed with Guardiola even before the coach agreed to his three-year deal.

“It was very clear early on what kind of player he was after,” Sammer said. “Mario’s name came up quickly.”

Guardiola “seemed to think it was impossible to get a player like that,” Sammer said. “When we explained that it might be a possibility, he was very excited.” The $47.5 million release clause in Götze’s contract with Dortmund was easily within Munich’s budget.

But how Götze will fit in, and how Guardiola will juggle the roles of the adaptable Thomas Müller, the emerging Xherdan Shaqiri and Götze are all part of the mystique of team building and blending.

How much, if at all, will Guardiola tamper with the indefatigable work ethic that Heynckes persuaded the wings Arjen Robben and Franck Ribéry to add to their flair? How will he change anything on a team that, among other things, utterly destroyed the side that he built for his former club, Barcelona?

“Everybody is very, very polite to us,” Guardiola said. And polite, too, was the Catalan’s way of sidestepping issues over the personalities and players he has inherited and has yet to strike a rapport with.

“I take over a team that played exceptionally in the last season,” he said. "When you are Bayern Munich, you always have pressure to play well. It’s one of the world’s biggest clubs. With that comes pressure, but I accept this challenge without fear. That is why I am the coach.”

The players, of course, spoke of their new boss in that same polite way. Philipp Lahm, the captain, said the first days had been fun. Guardiola, he said, “is the pleasant kind.”
Lahm added: “One can talk with him about everything. He has a clear vision. You can tell the coach is full of energy and has a clear idea of how he wants to play. We are hungry again, and we want to win more titles.”

Saying it and showing it, and somehow putting a new accent upon it, will all come under the microscope as soon as the new season starts in a month.

The getting to know one another began with handshakes at the Säbener Strasse training base in Munich. But it swiftly moved to the comparative serenity of Riva del Garda in northern Italy, where not 30,000 but 2,500 Bavarians clamor to watch training sessions.

History passes swiftly in soccer. It has to, because Borussia Dortmund, the team that Munich beat in the Bundesliga, and beat, 2-1, in the Champions League final in May in London, is also regrouping.

“I was not as depressed as you might have imagined,” Borussia coach Jürgen Klopp said over the weekend. “A win at Wembley would have brought other problems. Then we would have won all that there is to win — it is not so bad that it did not work the first time.”

Klopp has tried to reverse the psychology of winning and losing. His team, which is taught to play closer to the Guardiola ethos of movement and control rather than Bayern’s more physical approach, has lost Götze but gained a striker, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, from Saint-Étienne in France and a defender, Sokratis Papastathopoulos, from Werder Bremen in Germany.

While Klopp wants his team to give fewer goals, Guardiola wants to improve a Munich attack that scored 98 goals last season in the Bundesliga. “I don’t like it when the opposition has the ball,” Guardiola said. “And when we have it, I want to score more goals.”

Subconsciously perhaps, Guardiola sounded like the Catalan he is. He was expounding on the expressive soccer learned in his childhood at Barça’s academy. Converting Germans to that style of play might take a little time and persuasion.