Why Sadio Mane is yet to explode at Bayern and may not start against Man City

When Sadio Mane arrived to much fanfare in Bavaria last summer, there was serious talk about him winning the Ballon d’Or.

The newly crowned Senegalese Africa Cup of Nations champion wasn’t just supposed to strengthen Bayern Munich’s options in attack but become the key man in their post-Robert Lewandowski era.

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Head coach Julian Nagelsmann and sporting director Hasan Salihamidzic expected the long-time Liverpool star to score of plenty goals in a new, fluid system featuring multiple hybrid strikers and also set the benchmark for those around him. Mane’s energy, mentality and work rate, Bayern hoped, would galvanise new colleagues such as Kingsley Coman, Serge Gnabry and Leroy Sane, who were a little too inconsistent for the club’s liking.

It hasn’t quite happened. Not yet, at least.

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Mane has scored six goals in 20 Bundesliga games in his debut season while mostly playing high on the left in a flexible 4-2-2-2 system. But Nagelsmann felt moved to field veteran Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting as an orthodox striker from October onwards. A month later, Mane got injured (inflammation of the fibula head in his right leg) and would miss the World Cup.

There were encouraging signs in the 1-0 win away to Freiburg on Saturday, a game where Mane registered the highest number of intensive sprints among all players on the pitch, but he’s still well short of his devastating best.

The 31-year-old has found the net 11 times in 31 appearances for Bayern across all competitions but is goalless since October.

Five years on from helping destroy Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City with Liverpool in the Champions League quarter-finals (5-1 on aggregate), Mane isn’t a guaranteed starter when Bayern go to the Etihad to face City at that same stage of the competition tonight (Tuesday), even though Choupo-Moting is out with a back injury.

Bayern officials have put forward several explanations for his less-than-expected impact.

Chief executive Oliver Kahn recently admitted Mane was yet “to explode” in Munich, pointing at the need to adjust to Bayern’s cut-throat environment.

“He’s still in search of himself a little,” the former Bayern and Germany goalkeeper told Sky Germany. “He’s a player that needs a lot of encouragement. He’s not used to the type of competition for places we have here. It wasn’t like that at Liverpool. We hope he will come through for us sooner or later.”

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Mane knew there would be competition for game time at Bayern before he signed in a £35million ($43.6m at today’s exchange rate) deal. Creating a deep squad and the resulting fight for starting berths has been one of the club’s key strategies in the past few years.

Internal pressure, bosses thought, would make up for any lack of focus that might come with their decade of domestic domination. It’s a shark tank by design, with little time afforded to out-of-form forwards and/or new additions who don’t hit the ground running.

Reports of a massive fall-out between Nagelsmann and Mane over the forward’s omission from the starting XI for the second leg of the round-of-16 triumph over Paris Saint-Germain last month — he only played for eight minutes — were widely overblown.

But it is true that Mane could have had more TLC from Nagelsmann.

At Liverpool, he had been used to Jurgen Klopp balancing his stringent demands with constant encouragement and empathy. Nagelsmann was more technical in his approach, making frequent line-up changes without explaining his decisions to the players affected.

Nagelsmann’s recent replacement, Thomas Tuchel, hinted at such soft factors before his first game in charge, the 4-2 win over Borussia Dortmund on April 1, when he said Mane (who got the final 20 minutes off the bench) was still adjusting to his new surroundings.

The change from Klopp’s standard 4-3-3 to several different systems didn’t do much for Mane in terms of finding a sense of personal rhythm, either. Close observers noticed he was sometimes trying too hard to do something special that justified his selection rather than making the obvious and less eye-catching move.

Tuchel also implied that his less-than-perfect physical condition after coming back from over three months out injured had hurt his self-assuredness.

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“I expect him to work hard and put the energy he’s shown so often for Liverpool on the pitch for us,” Tuchel said before that win over Freiburg. “Our game and Liverpool’s game against the ball is marked by intensity, attacking on the front foot. That gives you confidence (as a player).

“I believe he’s a striker that defines himself that way and if he does that, he will gain self-belief and security. In the end, it’s also obvious he needs a goal to feel really good.”

After the game, Mane’s first 90 minutes of the year, the former Chelsea head coach praised his performance as “an important step in the right direction”.

A look at his smarterscout profile shows Mane has perhaps been better than widely appreciated. Smarterscout gives players’ games a series of ratings from zero and 99, relating to either how often a player performs a given stylistic action (for example, volume of shots per touch), or how effective they are at it (for example, how well they progress the ball upfield) compared with others playing in their position.

While the comparison with his final season at Liverpool is skewed by his lack of game time, the more advanced positions he takes at Bayern and less emphasis on defensive work, the key attacking metrics have actually held up well or slightly improved.

Still, Bayern would have wanted more at this stage of his debut season — but they’ll analyse its final weeks carefully before jumping to big conclusions. Maybe expectations were somewhat unrealistic to begin with given Mane had just come off a marathon 2021-22 campaign (he played 65 times for club and country) that, judging by their Premier League position, seems to have diminished many of his former Liverpool team-mates.

Unlike Nagelsmann, who clashed with Lewandowski over the Polish striker’s positional deployment before his departure to Barcelona last summer, Tuchel is not personally invested in Mane’s signing and can thus afford to take a more relaxed view. He doesn’t need him to be the key player; just a well-functioning member of his team.

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With the help of the manager’s touch and his tactical tweaks, Bayern hope the 94-cap Senegal international’s performances will pick up just in time.

The Etihad tonight would be a good place for Mane to find himself again.

(Top photo: Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)

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