Pep under pressure: Why Guardiola's legacy is at stake this season for Bayern Munich

Some might call it a healthily rational explanation from a football club, others a rather convenient excuse. Either way, it has meant that the Bayern Munich hierarchy aren’t really making a public call on Pep Guardiola’s performance in the Champions League.

No-one at the top level of the club will outright say that the Catalan has to win the competition. When they went out at the semi-final stage for the second time in successive seasons back in May, all the talk was of how Guardiola has achieved the primary target of regularly reaching the top four, and how it’s impossible to expect any guarantees from games as susceptible to sensational unpredictability as knock-out ties.

Except, it’s difficult not to imagine that some at the club are themselves thinking otherwise. Former Bayern midfielder Steffen Effenberg this summer typically said what everyone else was skirting around: “Guardiola is a world-class coach, but he has to prove now that he can win the Champions League with this squad, because that’s what FC Bayern are expecting.”

That is also what his time at FC Bayern will be exclusively judged on - either a massive failure or success, all on one trophy. It may even affect his entire reputation as a coach, since there is still so much debate about how much of his success at Barcelona was down to the quality of the squad.

On many levels, that is totally understandable and fair. Given the level that Bayern were at when Guardiola took over, as well as the quality and resources of the side and that stellar reputation of his, they had appeared to reduce the challenge of winning the Champions League to the slimmest possible margins.

On another level, it is still a rather strange dynamic on which to so definitively judge anything. Years of hard work at a club will effectively come down to a handful of isolated knock-out ties, and all of them effectively 50-50 pairings against teams of similar resources.

After all, it’s not like Bayern got knocked out by Porto or Zenit St Petersburg. They’ve been beaten by the last two winners and the only two clubs in the world more powerful than them in the transfer market, in Real Madrid and Barcelona.

The first problem, however, is how badly Guardiola’s sides were beaten. They weren’t just eliminated. They were eviscerated. His aggregate semi-final score is 3-10 with Bayern.

The second problem is that these demands are precisely the price you’re going to pay if you pick a job where winning the league is essentially pre-determined. It means the only challenges - and the only way you can really validate your work - are how well you can win it and whether you can also win the one competition that isn’t pre-determined.

It also means that what is largely an easy low-pressure job actually becomes very difficult and highly-pressured as the season goes on, and that is just one of the inherent contradictions of Guardiola’s time at Bayern. Rummenigge straight away pointed to another contradiction on the Catalan’s very first day as a manager, and it now seems as much a warning as a mission statement.

“For us,” Rummenigge began on that summer’s day back in 2013, "the most important title is the Bundesliga because it represents 34 matches. The highest prize as always is the Champions League, but it is a competition where there are no guarantees and the things you take for granted in domestic football don’t always work.”

Rummenigge was generally talking about how the freak results possible in any individual match are so much more damaging in a do-or-die knock-out competition than a long-term league campaign, but the truth of these words have been driven home in brutally specific detail for Guardiola.

In his first Champions League semi-final at Bayern, against Real Madrid, he had to make do without key players who had served him all season. The side went 1-0 down and the manager tried a different type of tactic, only to be destroyed by an opposition outfit who finally had the same attacking power as them.

It was one game, and the type of thing that can just happen… but history almost repeated itself. In his second semi-final, against Barcelona, Guardiola again had to make do without key players and again tried a different type of tactic. The tactic worked this time, but Bayern were holding his old side until he faced something else he doesn’t really see in domestic football - a Leo Messi on the top of his game.

This is just another contradiction of it all. As commanding as those defeats were, there are still a significant number of caveats. Those caveats may mean his time at Bayern ends up a relative failure if he doesn’t win the Champions League.

They are also why his reputation as a coach need not be overly damaged if that proves to the case. It would be basing too big a conclusion on too small a number of games, where the scope for wild swings either way is too excessive.

Whether this is an excuse or an explanation depends on your point of view. It’s just not as black and white as winning one knock-out competition or not.