Bayern Munich trailed in Mainz, the Bundesliga title already secured, with a Champions League last-four fixture against Paris Saint-Germain days away — and still they found a way to win. According to the Guardian's Andy Brassell, it is precisely that kind of moment which defines what this Bayern side have become under their manager.
The piece argues that the turnaround was more than a statistical footnote. Bayern are keeping alive the possibility of matching the best points total ever recorded in a Bundesliga season, and their goals tally for the league campaign has reached 113 in 31 matches, a record for a single Bundesliga season, the Guardian reports. Those are numbers that would be remarkable in isolation. In the context of a squad that has also progressed deep into the Champions League, they become something else.
Club chief Max Eberl, the Guardian notes, was candid about the significance of the recovery at Mainz. The details of what was said in the dressing room at half-time are not public, but the outcome — a team that refused to treat a title-already-won fixture as a formality — tells its own story. The manager found the right words, as Brassell puts it, and the players responded.
That capacity to demand full engagement from players even when the competitive stakes have formally dissolved is not easily manufactured. Bayern have long possessed squads of enormous individual quality, but the consistency of collective effort on show this season has its own character. The Kompany method, as the Guardian frames it, appears to rest on an intolerance of half-measures regardless of context — league position, fixture congestion or calendar timing notwithstanding.
The test of whether that method can sustain itself at the very highest level now arrives in Paris. A Champions League semi-final against PSG is a different proposition from a mid-table Bundesliga side on a Monday evening, and Bayern will need to carry the same intensity into a fixture where the margin for drift is considerably narrower. What the Mainz result offered, at the least, was evidence that the mentality travels.