Bayern Munich's Midfield Is Pep Guardiola's Next Big Challenge

“Put the good players in the midfield.” In Pep Confidential, Marti Perarnau’s revealing inside account of Pep Guardiola’s first year in charge at Bayern Munich, the key tenets of the eponymous subject’s thinking are clear and direct.

Though the coach is quite insistent in his exchanges with the author that—contrary to stereotypes—he is no fan of possession for possession’s sake, there is no doubting the focus of his method of seeking to control games.

“That’s my idea and I’m going to stick with it,” Perarnau recounts Guardiola saying. “Get the good players inside, hold on to the ball and be aggressive.”

There is no disputing that the three-man midfield that finished Bayern’s season against Mainz, Philipp Lahm, Xabi Alonso and Bastian Schweinsteiger, are quite a bit more than good players. Yet after a good (if slightly unfulfilling) season, Guardiola’s midfield is probably that area of greatest concern to him as the team moves forward.

Bayern had begun the campaign eight months earlier, at home to Wolfsburg, in an entirely different shape, and with entirely different personnel. Lahm was in defence as Guardiola employed a 3-4-1-2, with David Alaba and teenager Gianluca Gaudino occupying the central slots. If you considered that there was a central three in the midfield, then the last of the trio, Mario Gotze, occupied more of an orthodox No. 10 role in it.

In terms of poise, momentum and emphasis, those midfield line-ups for the first and last days of the Bundesliga season are like day and night. So what does Guardiola really want Bayern's midfield to be?

Firstly, we have to acknowledge how much the fielded players were dictated by circumstance. For the curtain raiser against the Wolves, post-World Cup weariness reigned (as it did in Dortmund as well, of course), and Schweinsteiger’s continuing injury problems from Brazil left him marginalised. Thiago Alcantara was still some way off a return.

By the end of the campaign Alaba was out, having already missed a raft of crucial matches with knee trouble. The bottom had fallen out of Gotze’s form to such an extent that less than a year after the triumph of his World Cup final winner, he was arguably at his lowest professional ebb since first establishing himself in the Borussia Dortmund senior side.

These absences weighed heavily, even if it continued a theme that has run throughout Guardiola’s tenure; he has never had all his midfielders fit at the same time since arriving in Munich. Though the losses of Franck Ribery and (more crucially in the season’s final strait) Arjen Robben forced Bayern to be a little more direct, the changes in the centre of the park slowed Bayern down too.

Guardiola began the Champions League semi-final first leg at Barcelona close to that initial shape of the season, in a 3-4-2-1. Yet with Lahm and Alonso in the middle, Bayern were left behind by Barca’s cut and thrust, with the coach forced to switch things around.

The age of the squad is a general theme that concerns Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, as the CEO told Owen Hargreaves in the recent BT Sport documentary Inside Bayern Munich. It was something particularly apparent in that closing stanza of the season. Alonso, for example, remains a fine player, but would benefit from younger legs around him.

Manu Fernandez/Associated Press

One has to assume that Thiago, the author of an astonishingly fluent comeback in the season’s closing weeks, will be the cornerstone of where Bayern are going, with his mobility and dizzying range of passing.

Perhaps Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg, loaned out to Augsburg for the second half of the season against Guardiola’s preference, will be too. The Dane is still only 19, but was impressive for Markus Weinzierl’s side. He is known to be a favourite of Guardiola.

The absence of Javi Martinez was obviously felt (playing just 62 minutes of Bundesliga action in 2014/15), but it is dubious to count him as part of the problem or of a potential solution, with Guardiola likely to continue to prefer using him at centre-back. A return to right-back—one of the side’s few real weak spots—for Lahm would not be the worst thing in the world.

Bayern have such a powerful identity that such an area of doubt as their midfield is at present is particularly striking. Clarifying it will go a long way to deciding if Guardiola can return the Champions League to Bavaria.