Swapping Liverpool for Bayern a big mistake for Mane
FT Desk
- Updated: 6 Aug 2022 11:26 BST
- 4 min read
Liverpool get their Premier League campaign underway against Fulham on Saturday, the day after Sadio Mane scored on his Bayern Munich debut as the German champions thrashed Eintracht Frankfurt 6-1.
Mane left Liverpool for the Bundesliga in a €41 million deal this summer, bringing an end to six glittering seasons in Merseyside.
A Premier League and Champions League winner with Liverpool, Mane plundered 23 goals and five assists in his final season at Anfield and signed off as an Africa Cup of Nations winner with Senegal looking for a new challenge.
"Obviously it is strange - really, really strange - to no longer be a Liverpool player," he told Liverpool's official website on completing the move "But of course I had a great time, an unbelievable time. We won a lot.
Sadio Mané’s first Bundesliga goal 💪 pic.twitter.com/oSy6bFxLSO
— Football Transfers (@Transfersdotcom) August 6, 2022
"[But] my life is always [about a] challenge and when it came, I said to the club that I want to leave, I want to go somewhere else to see a new challenge. It is not anything else, it is just a challenge because for me I want to always be challenging myself to get better and better."
Mane has overcome many challenges in his life, and deserves immense credit for sending a huge portion of his wealth back home to help build schools and hospitals in an otherwise poverty-stricken region, but in footballing terms, he had a challenge right where he was.
A challenging league
Although he scaled the heights of world football with Liverpool, it wasn't a given. In his six seasons at Anfield, the Reds only won the league once, with Chelsea deposing Leicester as champions in his first campaign before Pep Guardiola's Manchester City won four of the next five league titles.
One of the best forwards in the world and greatest African players of all-time, Mane also had to prove on a weekly basis that he was even the best African winger at Liverpool, with Mo Salah bossing things on the opposite flank. Iron sharpens iron, and Salah's haul of 23 goals and 14 assists last season should have been motivation to try and match him this season, as he did in 2019.
But instead he has gone to Bayern, where he is the highest-paid player above club captain Manuel Neuer, where the team already looks to be built around him, and where, crucially, nobody but Bayern is capable of winning the league.
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Bayern's 6-1 win over Europa League winners Frankfurt was a procession, and it could have been worse. They beat Schalke 8-0 in the 2020/21 season opener, and haven't surrendered the Bundesliga title since 2012, when Mane was still at Metz and his former Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp was still Borussia Dortmund head coach.
"Who's that?" Roy Keane quipped about Mane when Liverpool were beating Man City to the Community Shield last Saturday - a 3-1 win in which Salah and Mane's tentative replacement Darwin Nunez scored.
England are three places and 31.428 points higher than Germany in the latest UEFA coefficients, meanwhile. Mane hasn't left Liverpool for a challenge; he's gone to Bayern for a holiday.
Mane is on this October's Ballon d'Or shortlist after his exploits for club and country. It'll be the last time.
