KEN EARLY: No Pep in their step but Chelsea can prove ‘real club’

When news broke last week that Pep Guardiola had agreed to become the next coach of Bayern Munich, much of the reaction focused on how wise Guardiola had been to choose a ‘real club’ with proper football values over the kind of plastic pop-up projects on offer at Chelsea or Manchester City.

Bayern never knowingly turn down an opportunity to boast about the superiority of their methods and club president Karl-Heinz Rummenigge told journalists that Guardiola had been particularly impressed by Bayern’s self-sustaining business model. Had Guardiola been motivated by money, Rummenigge explained, he never would have joined Bayern: it was the Bayern model that had seduced the world’s hottest coach.

The apparently-widespread notion of Bayern as some kind of organic, fair-trade exemplar of what real football is all about is a tribute to the marketing chutzpah of the club’s current administration. This is a club that until a few years ago was known as FC Hollywood, a club where Giovanni Trapattoni had to fight for the privilege of holding at least one training session a week behind closed doors.