The blame game at Bayern Munich is complicated right now, with lots of moving parts and ever-changing narratives. Depending on who you ask about the club’s shortcomings this season, the board is to blame, Julian Nagelsmann is mostly to blame, Thomas Tuchel is partially to blame, or the players are mostly to blame; there’s really no one, right answer at this juncture. Regardless, even if Bayern get a huge stroke of luck by virtue of Borussia Dortmund losing at home to Mainz on the final match week of the Bundesliga season, Bayern has been well below par this season.
Former Bayern and Germany midfielder Lothar Matthäus feels that some of the club’s most recent signings, spearheaded by sporting director Hasan Salihamidzic, don’t possess the proper “bite” that’s necessary for Bayern to succeed.
During the past two transfer windows, Bayern has brought in Joao Cancelo (loan), Daley Blind, Noussair Mazraoui, Mathys Tel, Matthijs de Ligt, Yann Sommer, Ryan Gravenberch, and Sadio Mane. Was some of those players have had decent seasons for Bayern, Matthäus thinks the bulk of them are not up to snuff for the club’s high standards, and slightly points the finger at Brazzo.
“You could have saved yourself a lot afterwards and put the Haaland offer on top of it,” Matthäus wrote in a recent column for Sky (via Az). Of course, Bayern had, at differing points, been linked with a move for Haaland before he committed to join Manchester City from Dortmund. He feels that with some of the money Bayern spent on their other players from the past two windows should’ve just been saved for a bigger, more marquee transfer like Haaland.
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Hindsight is always 20/20, especially in the footballing world, where things move at an incredibly fast pace. One day, you can be a hero, make one slight wrong move and go completely back to zero with a long period of no upward trajectory; it happens to even the best of footballers, managers, and front office members. Brazzo isn’t impervious to the highs and lows by any means. He was praised during the summer for some of the players he was able to convince to join Bayern, but they haven’t made enough of an impact to move Bayern forward from just wining the Bundesliga with Julian Nagelsmann last season.
“We all praised him for the great names, but this team has no bite, no will, no real identification with this club. Otherwise they would play football differently if they put on this jersey,” Matthäus argued in his column.
Matthäus could’ve also argued that Brazzo needs to shoulder some blame for being apart of the mid-season decision to sack Nagelsmann and replace him with Thomas Tuchel, but he only focused on the players that were brought in this past winter and summer. It was a pivotal period for Bayern after losing Robert Lewandowski to Barcelona and he was not adequately replaced, nor were the areas that needed serious addressing, though you could argue that De Ligt, Sommer, and Cancelo have had decent Bayern tenures, De Ligt perhaps more than the latter two.
