Late on Tuesday evening, when the fans upstairs had already disappeared from the stadium in Barcelona, Julian Nagelsmann, the coach of FC Bayern Munich, was sitting downstairs in the press room and said an astonishing sentence: “This is my first time at a club where you are going away in the Champions League not as an underdog, but as someone who should win. ”It wasn't amazing what he said, but where he said it.
He did not sit in the Estádio da Luz in Lisbon or in the Olimpijskyj in Kiev, where he will compete with his new team in the preliminary round of the Champions League in the next few weeks.
He was sitting at Camp Nou in Barcelona, where football has been played more beautifully than in any other stadium on the planet this century.
Christopher Meltzer
Sports correspondent in Munich.
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Is that really a place where FC Bayern “should” win?
Yes, it will be like that in September 2021. On that evening at Camp Nou, only the colors of the jerseys reminded of FC Barcelona, which has so shaped the sport with its style of play. Among others, Gerard Piqué and Sergio Busquets, the defensive and midfielder artists, ran on the lawn in the red and blue shirts. Under the coach Pep Guardiola they were co-creators in a spectacular team. Under the coach Ronald Koeman, they are meanwhile followers of an unspectacular team that could hardly defend itself in their own stadium. “We tried to do the maximum,” Koeman said later, according to the interpreter at the press conference. The maximum was then: a 0: 3. And because these three goals by Thomas Müller (34th minute) and Robert Lewandowski (56th, 85th) were actually still too few, said Joshua Kimmich,Another guest from Munich, a little less reserved: "We could have won higher."
It has certainly not happened often in recent years that an away player at Camp Nou was able to formulate such a conclusion with a clear conscience. "If you win 3-0 here, that is a very important signal," said Thomas Müller - but then did not explain how this signal should be interpreted: Were the winners simply superior or the losers simply inferior?
"They showed today that they are better than us," said Ronald Koeman, who had to watch from the front row as his players only took the Munich team by surprise once. In the 28th minute, defender Ronald Araujo, who had left his position for a free kick, was unrestricted in the penalty area. He headed the ball over the goal. And otherwise? "If you don't have the speed up front, it's very difficult to win," said Koeman. But it wasn't just the speed in the legs that wasn't there, but above all the speed in the mind and in the passes. The new Barça team lack the old Barça qualities.
If you looked around near Camp Nou before the first season game in the Champions League, you saw the fans of a club that has physically arrived at the reality of the present, but has not yet mentally detached itself from the past. At the stands in front of the stadium, men and women sold jerseys with the number 10 on them, but not the name of Ansu Fati, who will from now on wear this number, but of Lionel Messi, the miracle player who has worn her over the past 13 years Years. But Messi is gone - because FC Barcelona (gross debt: 1.35 billion euros) can no longer afford him. The only thing is: Although the quality of the squad - instead of Lionel Messi and Antoine Griezmann (loaned to Atlético Madrid) playing in the storm Memphis Depay and Luuk de Jong - has declined,it is not the claims. Neither internally nor externally. And so, on that first evening of the Champions League, FC Barcelona looked like a poker player who used to always hold an ace and a king in his hand - and now in the showdown with the big players only compete with a ten and a nine at most.
Julian Nagelsmann and his Bavarians immediately uncovered this bluff on Tuesday evening. They kept making the FC Barcelona players look helpless. You could see that especially in the moments when they should have switched to attack. Or as Robert Lewandowski said: “Barça couldn't see our goal.” His coach saw it similarly. "We defended very well and very passionately," said Nagelsmann - and explained that with ball control. This guarantees the "necessary grains on the defensive to defend more actively". That was visible - in half of the Catalans and half of Bayern, where the back four around central defender Dayot Upamecano lost almost no tackle. "And if you have the offensive quality that we have," said Nagelsmann, "the probability is highto win even when they played to zero. ”And so it happened - even if they were at least a little lucky before the first goal. Thomas Müller's shot, which Barça goalkeeper Marc-André ter Stegen would probably have saved, was deflected.
In the press room at Camp Nou, Julian Nagelsmann said that after his first Champions League victory with his new club, he would “take a little sip”. And even then, the suspicion arose that the coach and his team toasted the win against an opponent who, at least this season, is not one late in the night in Barcelona.