Raymond Verheijen: Pep Guardiola must change approach in 'demanding' Premier League

With the Spaniard about to move to the Premier League at the end of the season, Guardiola's current team Bayern Munich are aiming to take their third Bundesliga title of his three-year spell as manager at the club - and are still in the hunt for the Champions League.

However, the squad has been marred by injuries - with Mario Gotze, Franck Ribery, Jerome Boateng, Holger Badstuber, David Alaba, Arjen Robben missing playing time. Now, former Chelsea and Manchester City adviser Verheijen believes it would be unwise to use the same high-intensity style favoured by Guardiola in the more physically demanding Premier League.

Speaking to Omnisport (via Goal.com), the Dutchman said: "Guardiola's a teacher, he implements a very rigid playing style. That's very good in itself because he's very successful. But he went from Barcelona to Bayern Munich and, before he arrived, Bayern had the best injury record of all the teams in the Champions League.

"Then Guardiola arrived and, in three years, you see the injury record has gone down dramatically. They have one of the worst records in the Bundesliga. "It has to do with the fact that coaches of the highest level are very demanding during the season, so players are developing a lot of fatigue - not only in matches, but in training - and there is hardly any time to reduce that fatigue between matches.

"That's the main reason why Bayern went from one of the best injury records to one of the worst."

The one-time member of Guus Hiddink’s coaching staff at South Korea and Russia also commented that both Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp and his Manchester United counterpart Louis van Gaal had fallen into the trap of underestimating the demands of English football.

He added: "He's going to an even more demanding league where players will develop more fatigue in games and will need longer to recover, and the number of games will go up as compared to Bayern.

"It's a very tricky situation, and if he doesn't adjust, he will make the classic mistake that Jurgen Klopp and Louis van Gaal made."