Punch-ups, injury woes and six months without a goal - what’s going on with Sadio Mané at Bayern Munich?

It was dream stuff for those who love to disseminate scurrilous rumours or tear down the achievements of better men – Sadio Mané, once the adored hero of Senegalese and Liverpudlian alike, punching his team-mate in a fit of post-match rage amid an extended patch of poor form.

Leroy Sané’s busted lip, a grovelling apology in front of the team, a goal drought that drags back to October. If Mané was an icon you wanted to smash to smithereens, all the ammunition was gift-wrapped for you. Past his prime, out of time and head utterly gone. But is that a fair reflection of where Sadio Mané is? And why is Mané struggling when he was so consistently impressive for so long at Anfield?

Mané’s career at Bayern Munich got off to a pretty strong start – by the end of October he’d racked up six goals and two assists in 12 league games and topped that off with three goals in the Champions League group stage and one each in the DFB Pokal and the 5-3 German Super Cup victory over RB Leipzig.

That was despite being asked to adjust to new positions and tactical methods – having been played in the same position under Jurgen Klopp for so many years, there was inevitably some adjustment to do and that wasn’t made more straightforward by the now-departed Julian Nagelsmann’s tinkering – first Mané was deployed as a number nine, plugging the hole left by Robert Lewandowski, then asked to operate as a much narrower version of the inside forward he was at Liverpool. Still, he was plainly playing well and both scoring and providing at an even better rate than he had before the move.

But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t being viewed under a somewhat critical lens – his £35m move is a relatively rare large outlay from Bayern, or any other German club for that matter, and was bound to set the bar high – and there were some ready to present a case for the prosecution. His goals tended to come in games that Bayern were winning comfortably anyway – a 7-0 trouncing of VfL Bochum, a 6-2 detonation of Mainz – and he wasn’t contributing in tougher matches, failing to score from seven attempts in a 1-1 draw against Borussia Mönchengladbach and drawing a blank the following week as Bayern tied with Union Berlin.

The case against was true to a degree, with the 4-2 away win over Viktoria Plzen the narrowest margin of victory in a game he registered in, but he was also frustrated by no fewer that six disallowed goals in the Bundesliga and frankly, given that Bayern open up big scorelines with great frequency, the sample size for tighter games was very small.

Then came the injury. Surgery was required to re-attach a tendon to the top of his fibula after the knock he took against Werder Bremen in November ruled him out of the World Cup in Qatar. Mané didn’t play for over three months and has been on and off the bench since his comeback at the end of February. That his form since then has been underwhelming is undeniable, picking up an assist against Augsburg but otherwise failing to register a goal contribution and putting in substandard performances as a substitute against Borussia Dortmund and VfB Stuttgart as well as going missing in the 2-1 defeat to Bayer Leverkusen before being hoicked off at half-time.

Then there was the 3-0 defeat to Manchester City, the punch-up and the fallout. Mané was fined a reported £300,000 for attacking Sané and has been temporarily suspended from the squad. Rumours swirl that Bayern are looking to offload him this summer, and fan forums buzz with frustrated supporters who increasingly regard him as a flop.

That altercation, not explained by either party thus far as Bayern close ranks, has now put question marks over his mental state – whether he’s struggling to adjust to a new team and a new country, whether he has attitude problems, all the usual concerns that are loftily discussed whenever a player’s form subsides.

Never mind that he was previously regarded as a model professional, and indeed a genuine role model, and never mind the report by The Mirror that he may have been affected by the recent loss of his aunt - one moment of madness is all that is required to have a player branded as having a ‘bad attitude’. That is not to excuse Mané’s indefensible actions, but to provide context around them. This is not a man with an extensive history of poor behaviour, and it is hard to imagine this was any reflection of Mané’s true colours suddenly emerging after all this time.

There are substantial worries about that injury, however. Since his return he has looked shorn of that mythical and pseudo-mathematical ‘half a yard’ of pace, unable to shoot off his mark with quite the same briskness. If he has to adapt not just to another system under new coach Thomas Tuchel but also a changing body, then he faces a tough battle – he is 31 and plenty of players of a similar age have registered diminishing returns after such a severe injury.

But to write off a player with such an impressive history so early – and to do so when he had a perfectly good start to life in Munich – seems excessive and premature. Statistically, even with the struggles of 2023 incorporated into his numbers, he is actually outperforming many of the numbers he posted at Liverpool. His goals per game and xG rates are down fractionally but he is setting up goals at a better rate than he ever managed at Anfield, and in terms of goal contributions per 90 minutes, this is his best season since leaving Austria in 2015.

His shooting accuracy is up on the past two seasons, he’s teeing up shooting chances more frequently than he did in three of his last five campaigns, and so on. There are some statistics that point to a positional learning curve – his dribbling success rate is down, as is his passing completion – but overall the numbers tell the tale of a player still producing at the highest level, even if you can query the level of some of the opposition teams involved.

So despite the bust-up, despite the suspension, despite the poor form, and the injury, and the accusations being thrown about on social media, it may still be a little early to write Sadio Mané off. Perhaps Bayern have bought a player who isn’t suited to the role they want him to play, and perhaps injury and age mean we’re witnessing a premature downturn. Perhaps the fight and the fallout indicate personal concerns, but perhaps not – the cause of the altercation has quite reasonably been kept under wraps and anything seen in print is speculation until proven otherwise.

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The raw numbers still suggest a player who can contribute at the highest level, and with a new head coach it’s perfectly plausible that Mané’s role can be refined to get the best out of him. He still deserves to be viewed as a superstar with the tools to come good once again, even as he faces the first uphill struggle he’s endured in some time – but it would be no surprise if the Senegalese’s many critics are made to eat their words before too long.