Ancelotti's Bayern Style Shift Causing Concern, but Champions League Is the Goal

Carlo Ancelotti is one of only two managers to have won the Champions League three times—and the only one to have done so while leading more than one club. He also won it as a player.

He is engaging company, and his autobiography is infused with good humour and good sense. But one doubt remains about him as a coach: In two decades managing at Europe’s top clubs, he has only ever won three league titles—and one of those was with Paris Saint-Germain in 2012-13, when the French title pretty much came with the job.

His appointment at Bayern Munich was far more to do with the Champions League than with the Bundesliga. Pep Guardiola won the domestic title three times in three seasons with the club, but he slipped up each time in Europe. Ancelotti was seen as a Champions League specialist, and that’s why the recent defeat to Atletico Madrid has caused such a ripple of concern.

Of course, a side can lose in the group stage of the Champions League without it making too much difference. Atletico also have a habit of upsetting the supposedly more glamorous sides; they did, after all, put Bayern out of the Champions League in the semi-finals last season. But that defeat has come amid a downturn in league form, and that raises more serious issues.

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The Bundesliga title is taken almost as a given, something Ancelotti acknowledged in an interview with Gazzetta dello Sport last October, when Guardiola was still manager. “Bayern will win the Bundesliga without even taking their hands out their pockets,” he said. “I must confess that I cannot enjoy Bayern's games. There is simply too little real competition.”

But that brings pressure. When Bayern hammered Werder Bremen 6-0 on the opening weekend of this season, there was some praise, but it was tempered by the knowledge their previous four meetings in Munich had finished 5-0, 6-0, 5-2 and 6-1. Winning 6-0 was merely par.

Bayern have dropped only two points since. It’s only by the absurd standards expected of the superclubs that their present form is in any way troubling. They’re top of the Bundesliga, three points clear of Hertha Berlin and four clear of the side that looks most capable of mounting a serious challenge, Borussia Dortmund. They will almost certainly win the league for a fifth consecutive season. But they are not playing well.

Although they ended up beating Hertha 3-0, the scoreline flattered them a little. It took a last-minute goal to beat bottom-of-the-table Hamburg. And then, on Saturday, they dropped Bundesliga points for the first time this season, a flat display yielding a 1-1 draw against a Cologne side that admittedly remains unbeaten. The goals have dried up—just two in the last three games, both oddly coming from utility man Joshua Kimmich.

Perhaps it is just a blip, but the worry is that the downturn fits a pattern. The accusation against Ancelotti, the explanation given most often for his poor record in league titles, is that he lacks the relentless drive and focus to carry a team through a full season.

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He can bring them to peak for Champions League games but doesn’t have the personality for the week-to-week grind of the domestic fixture list. That may be what makes him such charming company; he is not driven, nor is he obsessed by the next victory, but he has a hinterland that allows him to place the game into perspective.

Ancelotti does not have a clearly defined philosophy of his own. His changes to Guardiola’s model were limited.

Before the Atletico game, Ancelotti told reporters:

"

The team was well set. There wasn’t a lot to change. Guardiola has done some very good work, I think. This team has a very good quality of possession, and good quality in its transmissions. It's not very difficult to coach this team, because they are used to playing in a certain way.

With Bayern, I want to keep having good possession but also try to play more vertically. You have to make your possession count. I’d like to see more crosses from our full-backs. Guardiola preferred to have wingers—like [Arjen] Robben, [Franck] Ribery, [Kingsley] Coman or Douglas Costa—doing that. I want to use that type of player to cross, but also to get on the end of crosses. I want more players in the box.

"

That demand for greater directness has perhaps been reflected by the slight drop in the number of passes—from 729 per game last season to 711 this. Accuracy has also dropped slightly from 88 per cent to 87 per cent.

Those falls are so small they’re probably not worth paying too much attention to, certainly not yet, but what is telling is how the number of tackles made has dropped from an average of 15.6 per game in the three seasons under Guardiola to 13.7 per game this season, figures from WhoScored.com.

Perhaps that’s partly a conscious policy. "We play more cautious," Kimmich told Bild. "We do not try 90 minutes of pressing play as with Pep Guardiola. This is simply not our plan. There are now phases in which we wait to go forward so we can create more space."

That would explain the fall-off in tackles and also the fact that Bayern are running around four kilometres per game fewer than they did under Guardiola.

But whether it’s policy or not, the danger is Bayern are left looking a little tepid. Ancelotti said in his post-match press-conference after the Atletico defeat that his side lacked "bite and determination" while the goalkeeper Manuel Neuer was clearly angered by the lack of intensity in the draw against Cologne.

"It's no wonder you drop points when you don't give 100 per cent," he told Kicker. "You can't be certain of somehow winning the championship with only 95 per cent."

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The question is why. Losses of form and intensity do happen. Nobody can be at their maximum all the time. But the worry is this is evidence of the familiar Ancelotti phenomenon, of his lack of intensity transmitting itself to the team.

Although the truth is it probably doesn’t matter in the Bundesliga—if you’re Bayern, you can win the league playing at 95 per cent.