Next Saturday, 13th September 2014, the all-powerful Bayern Munich will entertain Stuttgart at Allianz Arena for the third round of the Bundesliga.

The German champions have made a very pale image of themselves during their visit to Gelsenkirchen, where they faced Schalke 04 last weekend. After an intense start and an early goal from Lewandowski, Bayern have somewhat sat on their advantage and allowed the home side to pile on the pressure and it didn’t come as a surprise when the German international Benedikt Höwedes leveled the score on the 62nd minute.

Guardiola is experimenting with a new game style and a new formation (3-4-3) to go along with and such type of change takes time to be fully implemented and for the players to get used to it.

Next Saturday’s match will be against a team that is probably not enjoying the best of moments and it is undoubtedly a good opportunity for Bayern to cement their new game ideas and to increase their players’ confidence levels.

For the clash against Stuttgart, Guardiola will have plenty of players unavailable, such as Rafinha, Weiser, Thiago Alcantara, Schweinsteiger and Ribery, all sidelined due to injury. To make things worst for the Spanish head coach, the Dutch star Arjen Robben is also in doubt for the match, since he is not yet fully recovered from a recent injury.

As for Stuttgart, they are definitely not going through a very positive period, as they failed to win any of their latest five matches. After being eliminated from Pokal by Bochum (who are currently playing at the German football second tier), Stuttgart managed to grab an important draw at Moenchengladbach but once again slipped up at home last week as they lost to Köln by 2-0.

Their manager, Armin Veh, is far from having an easy task at the helm of the club and last season’s fairly modest performances transformed Stuttgart into one of the teams that had to struggle until the very end in order to avoid relegation.

For the match against the German champions, Armin Veh will probably still not be able to count on the contribution of Robin Yalcin, Mohammed Abdellaoue and Vlachodimos, all of them currently sidelined due to injury.

When both sides met at Allianz Arena last season, the home side won by the narrow margin of 1-0 thanks to a goal by Pizarro on injury time. Although they are still far from the quality level displayed last season, the  current German champions are firm favourites to win the Saturday’s match.

Bayern Munich

Stats: W-2 L-2 D-1

Recent Form - DWWLL

Stuttgart

Stats: W-0 L-3 D-2

Recent Form - LDLLD

Possible Line-ups

Bayern Munich (4-1-4-1) Neuer - Bernat - Dante - Boateng - Alaba - Lahm - Badstuber - Göetze - Ribery - Müller - Lewandowski

Stuttgart (4-2-3-1) - Ulreich - Klein - Schwaab - Rüdiger - Sakai - Gentner - Romeu - Maxim - Harnik - Didavi - Ibisevic

Prediction

Bayern Munich 2 Stuttgart 0