Gold with a taste – Kommersant

Last weekend, two football giants – Bayern and PSG – won the gold of their championships. But these victories of the German and French clubs did not brighten up the overall impressions of their season, which turned out to be very pale and hint at a serious personnel restructuring awaiting both teams in the summer.

German Championship

The outcome of the German championship should have seemed to be recognized as absolutely ordinary, ordinary. In the end, Bayern took the 11th title in a row. But, of course, he was not ordinary and ordinary for two reasons.

The first is the way in which such an outcome was secured. In this championship, there was no talk of any traditional Munich dominance. On the contrary, Bayern got the gold by a miracle. She got it in the final round. Moreover, in a situation that is completely unusual for oneself – not when it is necessary to retain leadership, but when it is necessary to take it away in absentia rivalry with a competitor. The competitor was Borussia Dortmund, and it was really hard to imagine that they would miss the championship title.

She was two points ahead of Bayern. That is, the Munich team had to win, hoping that Borussia would lose points in their match. At least two points: then the priority among the additional indicators came to the fore – goal difference. She was much better at Bayern. But the ray of hope for such a happy ending shone terribly dimly. In the decisive round, Bayern and Borussia got opponents of the same status – clubs that settled tightly in the middle of the table and had no tournament motivation. Munich met on a visit with Cologne, Dortmund hosted Mainz at home.

But something incredible happened. Bayern somehow coped with Cologne, although in the end, when Dejan Ljubicic equalized the score from the penalty spot, they hung by a thin thread. She was rescued by Jamal Musiala, who managed to score after all.

But rather, Bayern was rescued, of course, not by him, but by Borussia itself. Her match against Mainz turned into a classic story about how a team, which found itself a small step away from a huge accomplishment by its standards, suddenly panicked and buried itself. Dortmund played badly. They conceded an early goal, then missed a penalty kick, then conceded another… In the second half, Borussia came to their senses, but Niklas Süle restored the balance already at the end of stoppage time. And at that moment, his partners, of course, already knew that Bayern had survived their meeting and this ball was not enough for them, they needed another one. And there was no time left for him.

The second reason that gave the Bayern championship a special flavor was that it was a holiday – well, not with tears in the eyes, maybe, but definitely with a rather strange, bitter tinge. Immediately after the end of the Cologne match, various media resources – Bild, Kicker, Sky Sports – announced the dismissal of two key functionaries from the club at once, two of its famous players in the past – CEO Oliver Kahn and sports director Hasan Salihamidzic. An important nuance: the decision on it, as sources learned, was made even before the final round at an extraordinary meeting of the club’s board of directors. In other words, its members did not consider its results to be decisive for assessing the activities of top managers and the entire next season, which the patrons of Bayern apparently equated to a disaster.

He’s really been weird this season. Especially its final part. First of all, we are talking about the unexpected March change of the club’s mentor – Julian Nagelsman to Thomas Tuchel, initiated, presumably, just by Kahn and Salihamidzic and did not lead to the results that the authors of the trick were counting on. Under Nagelsmann, Bayern may not have been up to standard. But the fact is that her football after the appointment of Tuchel also did not sparkle with new bright colors, as well as sports performance.

If Bayern saved the status of the German champion in half, then they failed in two other tournaments in April.

In the quarter-finals of the German Cup, she was knocked out by Freiburg, which in the national championship did not aim for a position in the top three. And in the quarter-finals of the Champions League with Bayern, Manchester City finished too convincingly. And it seems that these defeats, coupled with the torment in the championship, which did not magically transform into another breakdown, made such a strong impression on the Munich leaders that they provoked them to carry out a personnel revolution. It is possible that the resignation of Oliver Kahn and Hasan Salihamidzic is only the beginning.

French Championship

PSG won their gold without the hassle that Bayern experienced. He guaranteed it to himself in the penultimate round, breaking away on the road in the world – 1: 1 – with Strasbourg. But the PSG championship is still terribly similar to the Bavarian case.

On the one hand, it is a definite milestone. For the Parisians, gold was not 11th in a row, but simply 11th. But it’s still the French record of all time. The former – ten titles – belonged to Saint-Etienne. Plus, the leader of PSG Lionel Messi received the 43rd trophy in his career. And this is a repetition of the record of Messi’s former partner in Barcelona, ​​Brazilian Dani Alvis.

But all the publications that covered the success of PSG – L’Equipe, BBC and others – focused not on beautiful numbers, but on the fact that in the summer the French club, like Bayern, is, apparently, waiting for a serious restructuring based on a season even more ambiguous than Bayern’s. In the course of it, PSG played without brilliance in the domestic championship, and in the Cup of the country they went down to the 1/8 finals, having failed against Marseille. In the course of it, he already once again embarrassed himself in the Champions League, losing in the starting round of the play-off just, as it turned out a little later, the crisis Bayern. Along the way, coach Christophe Galtier was constantly criticized for his lack of interesting ideas, and by May any doubts that he would not stay at PSG had already disappeared.

Finally, during this season, it turned out that Messi was staring in the direction of Barcelona or Saudi Arabia, not intending to stay in France, and Parisian fans were so disappointed in his friend Neymar that they were ready to boo him during the games.

And that’s not counting the regular news that the third pillar of the PSG attack, Kylian Mbappe, could leave the team for a contract with another giant. In general, and here, it seems, restructuring is coming.

Alexey Dospekhov