Matthias Sammer ennobled the Spanish star coach Pep Guardiola and at the same time named his great weakness.
“Guardiola is definitely the most important source of inspiration for football today. His possession of the ball is also debatable, but when it comes to changing positions, he’s brilliant,” said the 54-year-old to the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung”, “but it’s not in Munich managed to activate the last two percent.”
Sammer, who served as sports director for the record champions from 2013 to 2016 during Guardiola’s time as Bayern coach, criticizes that Guardiola took the team’s independence due to his own genius.
“Pep was always right with his analyses, his measures almost always worked out exactly as planned. As a result, the team stopped thinking a bit,” said Sammer, who has been an external consultant for league rivals Borussia Dortmund since 2018 acts, “at the end of this fantastic process, he didn’t let the team grow to the point where they could take the last steps on their own.”
Sammer also sees this as a reason why Guardiola has not yet been able to win the Champions League as Manchester City coach – in contrast to Ottmar Hitzfeld and Jupp Heynckes, with whom Bayern won the premier class in 2001 and 2013: “The great secret of leaders like Ottmar Hitzfeld or Jupp Heynckes was that they enabled teams to be independent in this way.”