Eric Dier became the subject of derision at Spurs – but he’s reminding us of his class at Bayern Munich, where he has now signed permanently.
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.
