Last week,in Bayern Munich's Bundesliga clash with Schalke at the Allianz Arena,the fifth official held up a substitute board on the 26th minute that indicated that Mario Gotze would be coming off for central defender Dante.The young German international looked up, acknowledged the signal and quickly jogged off the park without much fuss. Just 10 minutes before, Gotze had seen his teammate Jerome Boateng get sent off, and bringing another defender on for an attacking player made perfect sense.But that wasn't the only reason the former prodigy was so content with trotting off the Munich pitch that day. For despite still being one of the best players in German football at the moment, Gotze has quickly gotten used to slinking out of the limelight at Bayern.Although the Bavarian club may be flying high at the moment in the German top division, Gotze has only remained on the pitch for the full 90 minutes six times from his 20 league appearances this season, according to Transfermarkt. Sure, he's started 16 of those games in the starting XI, but rarely does the former Borussia Dortmund star finish them under Pep Guardiola.In a team that bolsters the likes of Robert Lewandowski and Thomas Muller up front, with reinforcements in Franck Ribery, Arjen Robben, Thiago Alcantara and Bastian Schweinsteiger in midfield, it can at times seem rather crowded and hard for Gotze to get a wordor indeed a goal or assistin.With the news that Germany's other golden boy, Marco Reus, has decided to sign a new deal at Dortmund until 2019, the eyes of the Bundesliga will once again return to Gotze and ask a very simply question: Was moving to Munich really such a good idea'When we take a look at the graph above, which denotes how many minutes it took both Gotze and Reus to either score a goal or and assist over the past four seasons using data from Transfermarkt, we can see a direct altercation in the manner in which both players are moving.Comparing each record with the player's time on the pitch makes for a much more efficient way of defining what each player does on the field rather than simply stating how many games each player was selected for each season.In the summer of 2013, Gotze left Dortmund to sign for Bayern after what was his most successful season at the club in terms of goals and assists, but since then, his record has fallen, and he is scoring or assisting less often in the Bundesliga and Champions League.Reus, on the other hand, has seen a more natural fall in the time it takes him to score or assist goals, first at Borussia Moenchengladbach until 2012 and then Dortmund.Sure, we see a slight dip in his performances during his first season at Dortmund, but the status quo seems to have refigured itself, and the German international is back and enjoying his football at the Westfalenstadion.Similar circumstances present themselves when we take Gotze in isolation, away from the comparison to what is a very similar player in Reus, showing us a slight dip in his record since leaving Dortmund.The graph below offers a simpler look at his goals and assists each season, including his record thus far in the current campaign under Guardiola, and as we can once again see, his stats peaked in 2013 before moving on to Bayern.What may really trouble fans of the player isn't his goalscoringwhich remains quite resolute throughout the past two-and-a-half seasonsbut the manner in which his assists have taken a real plummet. Gotze may be scoring a similar level of goals, but he isn't creating anywhere near the amount he once used to.Now this may seem a little unfair at first glance. The only data we have of Gotze's time at Bayern is from his first seasonone in which he was almost certain to take time to fit inbut the truth of the matter is that a player of this calibre should be doing much better.Not only should Gotze be matching his Dortmund records, but in a team such as Bayern's, he should be far surpassing them without much effort at all.Reus has settled his future (for now) and looks to get back to the football at Dortmund as he hopes to continue adding to his game in Germany. But if Gotze doesn't figure out where he fits in at Bayern and get back to doing what he does best, he may find Reus overtaking him before too long and putting a serious question mark over his move to Bayern.@Sbienkowski
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