9 months ago
Three-time champions Germany will host the European Championship next year, and while the team has traditionally been unrelenting in international competition, the current squad looks in terrible shape heading into the summer.
In September, the day after losing 4-1 to Japan in a friendly, Germany parted ways with coach Hansi Flick. The decision came after a number of poor years for the four-time world champions, including failing to make it out of their groups at the 2018 and 2022 World Cups under Flick.
Since then, manager Julian Nagelsmann has managed four games, but we didn't get to see the famous "new manager" in his early days in charge.
The 36-year-old's record as national team coach is 1 win, 1 draw, and 2 losses. And in July, 2014 World Cup winner Bastian Schweinsteiger emphasized that Guardiola's influence on German football was a contributing factor to the national team's decline.
Schweinsteiger, who played under Guardiola for two seasons at Bayern Munich, told talkSPORT that German ideals had been lost under Spaniard influence. He said:
"When Josep Guardiola came to this country and joined Bayern Munich, everyone believed that we had to play this kind of football, including short passes and everything else.
In a way. , we have lost our values." "I think most other countries saw Germany as a fighter, that we could go all the way, and so on. "We've lost some of our strengths over the last seven or eight years. We put that behind us and focused on passing the ball to each other well. That's one of the reasons."
Guardiola scored a hat-trick in the Bundesliga championship, becoming the first foreign manager to win the German top flight three times. The Catalan player has won the DFB Cup twice with Bayern.
However, they failed to win the Champions League and Guardiola eventually left the German team to join City, who last year won the historic treble of the Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League.