It's not just the fact that the manager won the title in his first season and the bookmakers liked his chances of winning the treble this season. Bayern are the betting favourites to win the German Cup (they're in the quarterfinals) and the Bundesliga (they're one point off the top) and they're second favourites behind Manchester City to win the Champions League.
Nor is it just the fact that the club let the news leak this week and Nagelsmann found out through the media while skiing in Austria during the international break.
Nor is it just the fact that a mere four days earlier, Bayern chairman Herbert Hainer talked about how the club was planning "long term" around Nagelsmann because he was "tactically and strategically excellent at the highest European level," that he had made "clear progress" in 18 months and that any doubts around his coaching come from outside the club. (Friday's sacking suggest that either Hainer's not fully au fait with what happens inside his club, or his nose got a little bit longer.)
Nope -- for me, what stands out is how even at the highest level, and even at supposed gold-standard clubs like Bayern, there is still plenty room for knee-jerk reactions, and long-term planning is just something you talk about in boardrooms, not something you actually do. (You know the clubs: the kind that proudly remind you that they not only do they win oodles of silverware every year and sell out every game, but they've been profitable for more than a quarter of a century.)
In 2021, Bayern paid a world-record compensation package of €25m ($27m) to Leipzig so that Nagelsmann could break his contract and, effectively, join them two years early, since his deal with Leipzig expired in 2023. They gave him a five-year contract, which is a rarity even among elite coaches, let alone 33-year-olds, which is the age Nagelsmann was at the time. His salary was a reported €8m a season, which makes the whole package close to €65m.
That's a staggering number. If you make that sort of commitment, conventional wisdom suggests you go all-in and live with the consequences until they become unsustainable. And Bayern's consequences -- even their worst-case scenarios -- were far from unsustainable.
To their credit, chief executive Oliver Kahn and sporting director Hasan Salihamidzic owned the decision. Kahn pointed out that post-World Cup Bayern were less successful and less attractive. "The big fluctuations in performance have cast doubt on our goal for this season, but also our goals for the future," he said, which basically means he no longer thought Nagelsmann would take them where they wanted to be. Salihamidzic didn't go into detail but said he had conducted a "thorough analysis of the sporting development of the team," which implies he agreed that Bayern weren't going in the right direction.
German media completed the picture with regard to Bayern's reasoning, and it broadly centered around four points.
The first is the lack of results and that, sure, they could still win the treble, but they could also screw up against Manchester City in their Champions League quarterfinal and Borussia Dortmund when they face off in Der Klassiker in the Bundesliga on April Fools Day, thus blowing their chances at their two key objectives this season. Yes, they could mess up everywhere and finish the season empty-handed, but the question to ask is how much better are your chances after bringing in another guy for those games, especially when he'll have maybe two days of full training after the international break before they face Dortmund? And is that worth abandoning the Nagelsmann project you so believed in 18 months ago?
