A new era at Bayern Munich got underway over the weekend with their 4-2 win over Borussia Dortmund at the Allianz Arena that sent them back to the top of the Bundesliga table. Thomas Tuchel secured his first win as Bayern manager in his first match in charge of the club, just around a week after he replaced Julian Nagelsmann, who was dismissed from the club rather abruptly.
When Tuchel was sacked by Chelsea, there were quite a lot of moving parts going on behind the scenes in the upper echelons of the club’s ownership and they spent record numbers in the winter transfer window just a few months after letting Tuchel go. His sacking came about after a 1-0 loss to Dinamo Zagreb in the Champions League in September, but Tuchel has still said that he really felt he was going to have a long-term stint at Stamford Bridge and that the club had really changed too much in the time he’s been there. Reacting to Graham Potter’s sacking over the weekend, Tuchel even remarked that the club he signed for in 2021 didn’t really exist anymore.
As far as Bayern’s squad is concerned, the majority of the newer signings were all brought in under Nagelsmann’s discretion, and it’s a squad that Tuchel has now inherited. It’s still a world class squad, even without Robert Lewandowski, but there’s the natural inclination to assume that Tuchel has certain players in mind that he’d like to go after this summer. For now, though, he’s more than happy with the squad he has at his disposal, as club CEO Oliver Kahn eluded to on Bild TV over the weekend.
“You heard him say he’s totally convinced of the current squad and that it’s one of the best in Europe. At the moment we have other things to do. We have two months where we can win everything. That’s our focus,” Kahn explained, affirming that the club’s main focus is the silverware that’s Bayern’s for the taking (via @iMiaSanMia). They are still well poised to push for another historic treble and are not getting too carried away despite leapfrogging Dortmund back to the top of the Bundesliga table.
It remains to be seen how Tuchel’s tune changes as we get closer to the end of the season and the summer transfer window, but for now he’s got all of the right puzzle pieces to win three separate trophies with his new club.