Pep Guardiola, the coach of Bayern Munich, last Friday heard an offer he found eminently resistible. Asked ahead of Bayern's 3-0 win at Mainz what he made of reports in England he was a candidate to manage the English national team, he cut short his press conference, with a gesture indicating not just that the story had no foundation, but that the whole tiresome chatter about his future has begun to get on his nerves.
Guardiola is being encouraged to sign a new deal with the Bundesliga champions that would extend his current contract beyond next summer. The most fevered and frequent speculation is that England would be the likeliest alternative destination, but for a club job, like Manchester City, or Manchester United. That seems logical enough. The last two Premier League champions, Chelsea and City, have sounded him out before.
Having won titles in Spain, with Barcelona, and Germany, with Bayern, the wealthiest league in Europe would also seem to offer the next big piece in Guardiola’s career jigsaw, and perhaps a refreshing challenge. Winning the Bundesliga Shield with Bayern can look a relatively straightforward assignment when it is sealed with four – as in 2014/15 – or seven – in 2013/14 – matches to spare. Already this season, the title holders are in a place Guardiola recognises as practically automatic, at the summit of the Bundesliga.
Germany takes on England twice in the Uefa Champions League on Wednesday night, and the meetings between City and Borussia Monchengladbach and United and Wolfsburg would seem to emphasise some of the distinctions between the Premier League and Bundesliga. The Manchester clubs finished second and fourth in their domestic table last season, comfortably behind first-placed Chelsea; Wolfsburg and Monchengladbach were second and third, well behind Bayern.
But the ceiling on the German clubs’ ambitions is set a good deal lower than on the Manchester clubs. United and City would expect to be contenders for the Premier League. True, Wolfsburg were Bundesliga champions back in 2009, but that seems a distant triumph, still more so after a week when they lost 5-1 at Bayern, and learnt that their patron, the car manufacturer Volkswagen, is planning widespread financial cutbacks to offset the economic blows the company anticipate after they were found to have installed illegal devices to give false emissions readings on some of their vehicles.
“I anticipate no change in our situation,” said Klaus Allofs, the Wolfsburg sporting director, although he acknowledged how dependent the club are on VW, the principal employer in the city of Wolfsburg. Ticket sales do not provide the kind of money that made Julian Draxler the club’s most expensive recruit at the end of last month, at €35 million (Dh144.5m) from Schalke.
Indeed it was the Premier League’s vast wealth that allowed Wolfsburg to budget for signing Draxler at all. They had just received the mammoth sum of €75m from City for the transfer of Kevin de Bruyne.
Monchengladbach have tried to raise their standards by tapping into the Premier League’s largesse, too. They have defender Andreas Christiansen on loan from Chelsea. Last season, Thorgan Hazard, Eden’s younger brother, was borrowed from Chelsea by Gladbach, his transfer becoming permanent in the summer. Hazard junior has had a confusing time lately, dropped as Monchengladbach made a poor start to the season, and said farewell to coach Lucien Favre.
They hope a better run of two successive wins in the Bundesliga will embolden them against City. But they are David against Goliath. Monchengladbach spent just under €30m on new players in the summer; City spent close to €200m.
Yet what City, and other Premier League clubs, have learnt long and hard in Europe over the past three seasons is that wealth does not necessarily mean success. Only Spanish clubs have done better, collectively, in European competitions than Germany’s since 2011. Bayern take much of the credit for having guided the Bundesliga above the Premier League in the Uefa coefficients that measure the best domestic leagues.
They are very different beasts, though, the Premier League and Bundesliga. In an excellent new book on Germany's rise to the moment the national team won the 2014 World Cup, Das Reboot, the author, Rafa Honigstein, quotes the chief executive of the Bundesliga, Christian Siefert. "I wonder what the Bundesliga would do if it had as much money as the Premier League," he asks. "Would Germany still be world champions or would we try to have a global All-Star league instead?" His implication is clear: It is one thing or the other.
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