Disrespect former Spurs man Eric Dier all you like - he's starting to prove people wrong at Bayern

The response to news that Eric Dier has signed permanently for Bayern Munich begs a question – exactly when did English football fans decide that Eric Dier was bad? Somewhere down the line, a player with 365 appearances for Tottenham Hotspur during one of their most successful periods and 49 caps for England became a figure of fun, rather than respect, and it’s hard to pin down the moment that public perception turned.

Dier’s loan deal with Bayern apparently included a clause which automatically signed him to a permanent one-year contract in Bavaria next season if he made three starts for the club. He has four already, so when his Spurs deal ends this summer he will become a Bayern player on a full-time basis. The reaction from English fans on social media has been one of bemusement and some rather cruel attempts at wit. The reaction in Germany has been very different.

This is the first time that Dier has been introduced to a new audience for some time – a decade, in fact, since he joined Spurs from Sporting Lisbon. And that new audience appears rather more appreciative of his talents than many Premier League fans might expect.

Let’s pick out a few of the top comments on social media posts announcing the news. From Premier League fans – “Bayern have lost the plot”, “Bayern fans must be fuming right now”, “no more trophies for them.” From Bayern fans, who have actually watched him play for their team – “he’s been good so far”, “he is great”, “he was very solid”.

You get the gist. It would be a stretch to say the reaction from Bayern supporters to his signings has been ecstatic – stereotypical Teutonic reserve would be a more accurate description – but everyone at the club seems perfectly happy to sign a Spurs cast-off who has been the subject of derision in England despite being good enough to be one of the first names on the team sheet for Mauricio Pochettino, José Mourinho and Antonio Conte over the course of many years.

The only time that Dier really lost his place in the Spurs line-up prior to the arrival of Ange Postecoglou was around the period of transition between Pochettino and Mourinho, when he was dogged by fitness issues that included a persistent hip injury and appendicitis. When he was back and fit again, he looked rather rusty and Mourinho took a little while to warm up to his charms. But Mourinho, as Thomas Tuchel apparently has, came around before too long.

And now he is being named in the starting line-up for key games, like the one against Leipzig - ahead of Kim Min-Jae, in this case, who was signed from Napoli for €50m (£42.9m) in the summer and who is widely considered one of the best defenders in Europe. There are two options for the fan here – to either presume that Tuchel has lost his grip on sanity, or to accept that perhaps Dier isn’t so terrible after all.

It's true that he wasn’t always as commanding a presence under Conte as he had been previously at Spurs, and equally true that he never really nailed down a place in Gareth Southgate's starting side – although he did, lest we forget, make the 26-man squad for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, so Southgate clearly appreciates him. But both his relative slide in stature and what amounted to his exile under Postecoglou owe more to the changing nature of the game than to any lack of quality on Dier’s part.

Dier is a strong but limited defender. He has the old list of attributes that a manager would once ask for in a centre-half – he’s tall, rugged, powerful in the air, judges his tackles well and sticks to his man like glue. What he doesn’t have is many of the skills that have become important to many more modern tactical set-ups.

In particular, he isn’t quick by the standards of a professional player and that’s a problem for any manager who wants to play a high line. Postecoglou’s methods simply don’t leave room for a slow centre-half – Spurs now push up and press high and that necessitates defenders who can chase back at speed when the lines are breached. Dier is a liability in the Australian’s system, but that doesn’t make him a liability in general.

He's also not a technical player who can carry the ball out from the back with confidence or manoeuvre easily around onrushing attackers. As press resistance becomes key to the modern game, Dier has been left behind somewhat. He is old-fashioned, certainly. But that is not the same as bad.

Not that a lot of people haven’t made up their minds already – and it isn’t just fans doing so. When Bild, a German red-top tabloid, published an article which include a brief mention of the idea that some people at Bayern thought that Dier was too slow, it became fodder for full-length articles in a number of British daily newspapers and on specialist sports websites like ESPN. The rumour-mongering sites piled on, too. Despite all evidence to the contrary based on the way he was actually playing, a narrative was being created (and blindly accepted) that he was a failure at Bayern.

Nobody would say that Dier has been truly exceptional in Bavaria, but he has indeed been rock solid. Against Leipzig he was heavily involved, doing all those old-fashioned centre-half things he does so well – five clearances, a couple of them crucial, some good tackling and simple, economical passing to recycle possession. It was an exemplary performance for a defender in, say, 2015, but also worked just fine for the modern day as well. Bayern won, and Dier made a substantial contribution.

It's unlikely, granted, that Dier remains first choice at Bayern for the rest of the season. He played last weekend partly because Dayot Upamecano was suspended, and either Upamecano, Kim or Matthijs de Ligt have been unavailable every time Dier has been on the team sheet. But he looks every inch like the kind of rock solid squad player that a team with lofty ambitions needs, and he’s holding his own next to the more fancied players around him.

Somewhere down the line, we forgot that Dier was good. We forgot about all those crosses dealt with, all those last-ditch tackles made, all that shouting and scrapping as he marshalled the defence around him like the bellowing, shin-kicking centre-halves of old. Perhaps we even forgot his piledriver free-kick against Russia at Euro 2016, although Dier certainly never did. Heaven knows how many times he tried to replicate that at Spurs without success.

The changing face of the game probably leaves Dier as a long-term back-up, at least at the elite level. It’s unfortunate and rather harsh on a man who has been nothing if not immensely hard-working throughout his career, but still not as harsh as the blue-tick types in the comment sections. It’s likely Dier will quite rightly not care one bit what they think, but all those barbs are shaping a narrative which does Dier a deep disservice. A great player? Perhaps not. A little old-school? Sure. But a player who deserves respect? Just ask the Bayern fans.