Will Pep Guardiola's Bayern Munich Ever Repeat 2013's Treble?

It is not a familiar position for newly crowned league champions, but you could forgive Pep Guardiola for having woken up every day for the last fortnight wondering when the misery will end. Bayern Munich may end the season as Bundesliga champions, but are limping towards the end of the campaign.

With a Bayern comeback against Barcelona this week hard to imagine, even if they will have home advantage at an Allianz Arena which has proved a Champions League fortress this season (19 goals scored in five matches to date), there is plenty of time to reflect on exactly where Guardiola’s side fell short of their ambitions this season.

Alex Livesey/Getty Images

Never has the moment for self-analysis been more pertinent, for club and coach alike. Bayern are riding an unprecedented run of four straight defeats going into the rematch with Barca (even if the first of those, the DfB Pokal semi-final with Borussia Dortmund, was only ceded on penalties).

As in the aftermath of a heavy defeat to Spanish opposition in last year’s Champions League last four, Guardiola has had to face intense examination of his coaching and tactical decisions. This was especially so in light of his shift between a back three and a back four at Camp Nou last week.

Yet Guardiola has been in defiant mood. The Bayern coach described his team’s season as “super” in the Friday press conference which preceded the weekend loss to Augsburg (as per ESPN FC).

“The players are my heroes,” he said. “Only I know how difficult this season was.” It certainly has been that. If many think Guardiola is often too clever and attempts to complicate things, his injury list has given him increasingly limited scope to shuffle in recent weeks.

Jaime Valdez-USA TODAY Sports

If it seems trite for a behemoth like Bayern to complain about casualties, we can’t ignore this particular case—there are injuries, and there are injuries. Philipp Lahm, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Franck Ribery, Arjen Robben, David Alaba, Thiago Alcantara and even new man Medhi Benatia have missed big chunks of the campaign. Javi Martinez has played just once in the Bundesliga at the time of writing.

Jon Super/Associated Press

Yet if the campaign has been long, there is no sense of Guardiola being burnt out, as he was so badly towards the end of his Camp Nou tenure. It is no coincidence that renewed speculation linking him with a summer departure to Manchester City (again addressed in the run-up to this match, as reported by Bleacher Report) has emerged as Bayern have struggled.

Yet whenever he does leave the Allianz of his own volition—and the sense remains that it will be at the scheduled end of his contract in 2016, rather than earlier—it will be when he feels he has given himself a fair crack of the whip.

That has not been possible this time around, even if Bayern did go close to holding Barca last week, which would have made this return very interesting indeed. Criticism of Guardiola’s approach, and of Bayern’s physical and mental fettle, was more justified at this time last year, when the team clocked off from their best level once the Bundesliga was in the bag.

One suspects that the coach learned plenty in that spell about exactly what it took for his predecessor Jupp Heynckes’ side to close out that incredible, history-making treble in 2013, certainly in terms of intensity and focus.

Guardiola has himself grown in this campaign, figuring out that relentlessness is not always the best option; that there are times to drive on, and there are other times to ease off, and conserve energy.

The plague of injuries has deprived Bayern, and us, of the opportunity to see if the adjusted plan would have taken them the whole way. As Guardiola himself pointed out on Friday, a treble doesn’t happen every year—but you can bet he wants to give himself one more chance to see if he can bring it back to Bavaria.