There were no corks popped or giant beers splashed out at the Allianz Arena last weekend.

If Bayern Munich had hopes of breezing into Tuesday’s Champions League semifinal second leg against Atletico Madrid on the momentum of another Bundesliga title win, those hopes were dashed when Borussia Monchengladbach’s Andre Hahn cancelled out Thomas Muller’s early goal with a late equalizer in a 1-1 draw.

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Like Barcelona before them, Pep Guardiola’s team looked a little gassed from its Champions League excursion against Diego Simeone’s Atletico side. Following Wednesday’s 1-0 loss at the Vicente Calderon with the home draw against Gladbach represents the first time this season Bayern has dropped points in consecutive matches.

And while a record fourth Bundesliga title in a row is a matter of when and not if for the Bavarians, Guardiola must realize that, on some level, this is a week in which the legacy of his time as a Bayern Munich manager could be decided.

To say that Guardiola will have accomplished nothing at Bayern if he fails to win the Champions League is, of course, not entirely fair. Yes, winning the Bundesliga title seems like a foregone conclusion for Bayern these days, but that wasn’t necessarily the case when Guardiola arrived three years ago.

In the five-year period preceding Pep’s appointment, Bayern surrendered the title three times – twice to Borussia Dortmund and once to Wolfsburg. In 2011, Louis van Gaal’s Bayern did the unthinkable and finished third behind Dortmund and Bayer Leverkusen.

Since arriving at the club in June of 2013, Guardiola has re-instilled the kind of absolute domestic dominance Bayern enjoyed in the 70s and 80s. He’s also got the team playing more interesting soccer, winning the league earlier, and soon, for a record number of times in a row.

But fairly or unfairly, European success was always going to be the benchmark against which Guardiola’s time at Bayern was measured. It just wasn’t really in the script for Pep’s predecessor to sweep the club to a historic treble, just weeks before he arrived. The shadow of Jupp Heynckes has proved a long one.

The direct attacking soccer that Bayern played under Heynckes, not to mention the success it garnered the club, have periodically left Guardiola open to the accusation that he’s not really made the team better, just more complicated. That instead of making them more dominant, he’s simply made them more ornate. How very un-German!

For Guardiola to prove once and for all that he’s taken Bayern forward and not just sideways, he needs to lead the club to European glory. He must demonstrate that the measure of possession-based attacking sophistication he’s introduced to what was already a very good team has been worth the fuss.

It’s a tall order. Especially when the team standing in his way holds a 1-0 lead from the first leg, and that team is Diego Simeone’s Atleti. There’s no team in the world at the moment that can defend a 1-0 lead like Simeone’s Mattress Makers.

They did it on Saturday against Rayo Vallecano to maintain pressure on Barça in the La Liga title race, and that was with Simeone in the stands following his suspension for allowing a second ball to be hurled onto the pitch from his dugout last week. The win was Atleti’s fourth 1-0 in a row and it means they’ve now gone 510 minutes in all competitions without conceding a goal.

Even at the Allianz, where Bayern has lost just once this season, Guardiola must harbor few illusions about the challenge Atletico will present his team. His players certainly don’t seem to have any.

“We’re going to have to be on fire on Tuesday,” Muller told Bayern’s official website.

Muller was left out of the starting lineup in the first leg, a decision that led to more than a few eyebrows being raised in light of the result. Leaving your best player on the bench when you’re playing a Champions League semifinal at one of the most difficult places to play in Europe is a bold move, when it works.

When it doesn’t, as it didn’t last week, it looks a bit naïve, or perhaps, arrogant. Starting Muller on the bench also fed into the suspicion some maintain about Guardiola, that he is a man who is at times more consumed by the process than the result. That his tendency to get too comfortable and experiment is the reason his teams have so far failed to match Heynckes’ in terms of European success.

Failing to win the Champions League with Bayern won’t make any real difference in terms of Pep’s future. The bright lights of Manchester City, back-slappy press conferences crashed by Liam Gallagher and the promise of Premier League titles are all laid out before him.

But Guardiola wasn’t brought to Munich just to win the Bundesliga. He wasn’t even brought in just to win the Champions League. He was brought to Bayern Munich in the hopes that he might just become the club’s greatest manager of all time.

And if his high-powered, expensively assembled squad of world-beaters is ousted from Europe’s elite club competition by Simeone’s well-drilled band of cut-price superstars, bargain buys and castoffs from other clubs, it’s doubtful he’ll ever be seen in that light.

Guardiola’s team being ousted by Simeone’s could also lead to the narrative about who is the best manager in world soccer right now.

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