Carlo Ancelotti Can Give Pep Guardiola's Pretty Bayern Munich a Sharper Edge

"I would say that Bayern have never played more beautifully than under Pep," said Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, Bayern Munich CEO, per Welt am Sonntag (h/t Sport Bild; in German). "We have always been successful, but beauty was rarely one of our qualities. Under Pep, suddenly everyone was raving about us."

It is an interesting thought: people actually raving about Bayern. It seems as likely as German football fans actually accepting teams like RB Leipzig and Hoffenheim rather than turning their noses up at them as Johnny-come-latelys with their open chequebooks, plundering the trophies and glory that bitter, long-suffering fans believe should be the exclusive privilege of the Traditionsverein (the traditional clubs).

Despite not being one of the founder members of the Bundesliga in its maiden season in 1963, Bayern have come to be considered a traditional club by virtue of their rampant, consistent success. But they are certainly not loved, and even "warmed to" is pushing it. Ranting, yes, but raving?

Also, even Rummenigge's claim that "Pep was pretty" is spurious at best. Beautiful football was certainly not what Franz Beckenbauer thought he was witnessing at the Allianz Arena when he claimed he was exasperated by Bayern passing it back and forth a la Guardiola's tiki-taka Barcelona. "They will probably play something like Barcelona," said Der Kaiser, per Goal.com (in German), when asked to predict what Guardiola's future Bayern side would look like midway through the Spaniard's first season. ​​"Where you cannot look anymore because they are even playing the ball backwards on the goal line."

Still, with Ancelotti's team as laboured as one of their coach's halting sentences in many games this season, "beautiful" is not an adjective that can be applied to the Italian's Bayern as yet.

Then again, what does beautiful mean?

If you want to compare goals scored, Pep wins, hands down. Ancelotti's Bayern have 29 goals after 13 league games so far. Guardiola's side in his first season had 30 at the same stage, 32 the season after and a whopping 40 the following campaign.

If you define beauty by possession, it is Pep who gets the nod again, though only just: 63 percent on average per game throughout last season to Ancelotti's 61 percent so far. Undoubtedly more important still is what is done with the ball when they have it. Shot accuracy is just 43 percent for Ancelotti's side, Pep's three vintages were all above 50 percent. So, aesthetically and in terms of efficiency, Guardiola has the edge.

Still, it is early days—give Ancelotti a break! He was only appointed in the summer (though admittedly he knew since early 2016 that he would be taking over). However, the main question is: Why did Bayern appoint him in the first place?

Other than the fact they could not convince Guardiola that Munich's Englischer Garten was not better than him actually having his very own English garden, they see in Ancelotti a man who can bring them the Champions League once again, something Pep failed to do during his three-year tenure, beautiful football or not.

Markus Schreiber/Associated Press

The Bayern powers that be knew, given the due diligence they undoubtedly carried out on Ancelotti, that they were not getting a Guardiola Mark II. Anyone who saw the former Paris Saint-Germain coach's side play in the French capital will have been struck by a pragmatic approach embellished by occasional but effective touches of individual genius.

If you wanted beautiful football at the Parc des Princes, you had to wait for the arrival of Ancelotti's successor, Laurent Blanc. Blanc has since made way for Unai Emery, a coach with a proven European track record after three successive UEFA Europa League triumphs with Sevilla. The reasoning behind his appointment? To get PSG beyond the last-eight hurdle at which they have consistently fallen in recent seasons.

Yes, Guardiola won Champions Leagues with Barcelona, and no doubt he would have repeated the trick at Bayern given time. But Ancelotti has already triumphed in the competition three times with two different clubs, and that is what Bayern were looking for when—reluctantly—they had to let Guardiola go.

Beautiful football wins plaudits, but not always trophies. Just look at Arsene Wenger, whose team plays the football but only sporadically picks up the silverware, while Jose Mourinho—the last couple of seasons aside—does the opposite.

Matthias Schrader/Associated Press

Ancelotti is certainly not in league with the latter, but his team's play has lacked panache—that is, up until the first half of the game against Mainz, when it returned.

Playing a 4-2-3-1 that resembled something closer to the formation Guardiola played helped considerably. The players looked more comfortable, and the team was certainly more menacing to the opposition goal when Ancelotti abandoned the 4-3-3 he had stuck to since the start of the season. The art of good coaching is also to acknowledge when you are wrong.

That Ancelotti should imitate something resembling his predecessor's work is hardly surprising: Why change a winning formula? "I don't have to change much," Ancelotti told L'Equipe (in French) in September. "At Bayern, I want to continue having a lot of possession, but also to play the game a little more vertically. I want possession with a bit more of an end product, and I don't want us just to be happy to have the ball."

He added: "Possession is an important part of a dominant team in a match. But on that point, my opinion has never changed. You have to have an end product to your possession. If it serves only for you to control the rhythm, it's useless."

If one criticism could be levelled at Guardiola, it is that Bayern lacked verticality at times under him. When faced with teams they could not pass to death, notably Atletico Madrid in last season's Champions League semi-finals, or ultra-compact sides in the Bundesliga, they seemed to have lost the breathtaking, game-winning change of pace and art of penetration that had swept them to the treble under Jupp Heynckes in 2012/13. And yet they still had players like Douglas Costa, Arjen Robben, Franck Ribery and Kingsley Coman to do that.

Ancelotti certainly talks a good game in that respect, and his idea makes sense, particularly if he sticks to the formation that seems to allow his squad to play to their strengths. If he can emulate Heynckes and go one better than Guardiola's double of his farewell season at the Allianz Arena, then no one—and especially not Rummenigge himself—will be asking themselves, nor even care whether or not it was pretty football that got them there.