Having just done a photo shoot in a different part of Bayern Munich’s labyrinthine club offices, Ivan Perisic walks in wearing full kit but is all business. The words “work” and “hard” feature heavily in replies that are serious and honest. Because you can’t be one without the other. And what’s the point pretending, anyway? He is in Munich to play football, not play dumb.



The Croatian winger is fully aware he wasn’t Bayern’s preferred choice to supplement their wide options up front this summer. In truth, he wasn’t even “plan B, just like me,” as manager Niko Kovac had joked at Perisic’s unveiling, but a quite a bit further down the alphabet, a late “Lückenfüller” (gap filler) according to newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, called upon to momentarily fill the big gap left by someone who had never made it to Bavaria in the first place.



The German champions only took him...