After a couple of false starts during the early months of his tenure, the Dutch coach has put together a system in Munich which appears to be reaping dividends. bundesliga.de takes a look at what has made the difference, and how van Gaal has got the Bayern star ensemble properly up to speed.

System change

August 2009: having opened the season with two draws, Bayern are aiming to notch up their first league victory at newly-promoted 1. FSV Mainz 05 on matchday 3. Instead, they find themselves on the wrong end of a surprise 2-1 defeat. Bayern ran out that day in a 4-4-1-1 formation. Five of those in the starting line-up – Michael Rensing, Edson Braafheid, Anatoliy Tymoshchuk, Hamit Altintop and Danijel Pranjic – would play no part in the side which a few months later went about racking up one victory after another. Van Gaal got right down to work on the reconstruction of the team.

The first ray of hope appeared on the horizon just as the rumbling unrest over the below-par season start threatened to bubble over into open criticism of the new coach in the high-pressure atmosphere surrounding Germany's most successful club. Champions VfL Wolfsburg were dispatched 3-0, with the aid of two debut goals from Arjen Robben, freshly signed from Real Madrid. That performance led van Gaal to radically rethink his strategy and risk a return to the system that had brought him such success at Ajax earlier in his career.

Back to the roots

Using an attack-orientated 4-3-3 set-up the coach led the Amsterdam club to victory in the 1994-95 Champions league, at a time when 4-4-2 was virtually de rigueur in the top-level game. The van Gaal methodology of 15 years ago allowed his players to develop a controlled attacking game, with much of the action occurring down the flanks.

Former German international defender Christian Ziege, who got a close-up look at van Gaal's training methods during a summer coaching internship at Bayern, reckons it was no great surprise that the record champions had a few problems at the start of the season: "You had a new coach coming in, with a particular concept of how football should be played. He tried out a diamond midfield, which didn't really function the way he had anticipated. So then he showed what a good coach he is, by changing his system.”

Ziege believes that was the deciding factor, explaining that, "Since then, Bayern have been playing a bit differently. Van Gaal is deploying two wide men in an attacking role, usually Robben and Ribery. And I think it's working better and better for them.”

Further setbacks

It was far from being an overnight process however. Bayern went down to a 1-0 defeat at northern rivals Hamburger SV and there were disappointing home draws against fellow title aspirants Schalke 04 and Bayer Leverkusen. All of which stoked up fresh murmurings of discontent in the rarefied Munich media environment, the overriding question being: after Jürgen Klinsmann the previous season, would van Gaal be another casualty of the Bayern management's rigorous standards?

The answer only started to become clear in late autumn. Few of the fans streaming out of the Allianz Arena in the wake of their team's Champions League match against Maccabi Haifa on November 25th would have wagered that Bayern were about to embark on a fantastic winning streak. A 1-0 victory over the Israeli side had kept alive their hopes of progressing in the tournament, but once again the performance had been far from convincing.

Transformation in Turin

At that point, Bayern were seventh in the league, six points behind leaders Leverkusen, and well short of their own high expectations. It was now though, that the players would really begin to implement the coach's programme, to devastating effect.

The turning point was the spectacular 4-1 win at Juventus which sealed the Munich club's qualification for the knockout phase of the Champions League. The result was impressive enough, even more so however the dominating fashion in which it had been achieved.

Hand-in-hand with the tactical adjustments, there was a concomitant improvement in fighting spirit as well. From matchdays 1 to 13, Bayern's man-on-man statistics were in the negative overall, with the players winning just 49.3 percent of tackles on average. Over the following 12 matches, that figure rose to 54.3 percent, the highest in the division.

Staying on the ball

The team also improved significantly when it came to the number of attempts on goal, the accuracy of their shooting and the ratio of chances converted. The result was a return of 32 points from a possible 36 and, at the end of matchday 24, leadership of the Bundesliga for the first time in almost two years. Bayern are now unbeaten in 18 games in the league, their longest sequence since 2002, when they managed a 19-match run spread over two seasons. Not since 1986-87 have they gone so long without defeat in a single campaign.

A close look at the statistics reveals a core van Gaal principle: retaining maximum control of the game. His players execute the most passes – 523 per match on average – and do so with the most accuracy, 83.5 percent of them finding a teammate. In the opponents' half, pass accuracy is 76.5 percent, also a league best, as are the average 291 passes played beyond the half-way line.

No doubt about it, FC Bayern are right back on track thanks to the astute work of their head coach, as even the club's most demanding followers will surely admit.



Johannes Fischer / translation Angus Davison