Off the back of an impressive first half of the season with Granada, Bryan Zaragoza earned a move to Bayern Munich during the winter transfer window. A deal had been agreed for the summer, but the reigning German champions brought forward the operation by six months due to injury problems.
Despite this, Zaragoza has barely had a sniff. He has made just one appearance for Bayern since joining – this is despite having been in the squad on six occasions since his move from Granada was finalised.
Bayern head coach Thomas Tuchel explained that Zaragoza’s lack of minutes is due to his failure to properly integrate into the dressing room environment, as per Diario AS.
“First of all, Bryan just lacks the language. He finds it difficult to speak English and German, it’s an elementary component. We brought the signing forward to buy time and because we didn’t know how long Kingsley (Coman) and Serge (Gnabry) would take.
“It was already clear to him that it would be a very big step for him and now it shows. We see his quality, but we also notice that the integration is not complete from a linguistic point of view. That’s why we’ll give him time.”
These revelations are likely to mean that Zaragoza continues to play a bit-part role for Bayern in the coming weeks, and that will put his chances of being called up by Spain in serious doubt. That would be a big blow, especially with Euro 2024 coming up this summer.
