Bayern Munich, winners of 33 Bundesliga titles, six European Cup, 20 German Cups, and by far the biggest club in their country, have hired the manager of Burnley, a team who have just been convincingly relegated from the Premier League.
Vincent Kompany’s deal to become the new Bayern coach is all-but complete, with numerous reports over the last 24 hours claiming that the Belgian will take the helm at the Allianz Arena ahead of the 2024-25 season, and his appointment is as surprising as they come. This is a manager who has just four years of coaching experience, one of which came in the English second division. He has never coached a Champions League game, and his sole European campaign ended with a Conference League qualifying loss.
Kompany shouldn’t be faulted for taking the job, even if it feels like a massive jump. He is a promising manager, who, at 38, still has the chance to become a great one. Give him a few seasons at mid-level clubs, let him build on and further mould his ideas, and he might someday be ready for a job as big as the Bayern one. But this all feels like it’s happening way too soon.
More broadly, though, it speaks to the mess that Bayern are in. The Bavarians have burned through managerial targets since making the decision to let Thomas Tuchel go at the end of the season in February. After months of scouring Europe for potential targets, hunting down big names, and failing over and over again, they are left with a manager who seems underqualified and unprepared for a job of this magnitude.
Why Kompany?
Kompany’s managerial credentials don’t jump off the page. A long-time top-level centre-back, mostly for Manchester City, he became player-manager at his boyhood club, Anderlecht, in 2020. The Belgian side offered him a four-year contract, and charged the club legend with getting the sleeping giant back to the top. They finished fourth in his first season – during which Kompany swiftly retired from playing – and third in his second while also making the Belgian Cup final, all before he accepted the job to become Sean Dyche’s permanent replacement at recently-relegated Burnley.
His first season at Turf Moor was historic. Kompany had the Clarets playing delightful attacking football that earned comparisons to the slick setup of his former manager Pep Guardiola, and Burnley topped the Championship, winning the league with 101 points – becoming the first team to hit triple digits in nine years.
Perhaps understandably, bigger teams – most notably, Tottenham – showed interest in Kompany, but he chose to sign a long-term deal to keep him at the club until 2028. Everything seemed set up for success as he plotted a survival bid in the top flight.
But his debut Premier League campaign didn’t go to plan. Kompany never compromised on his attacking principles, and tried to have Burnley play the same fluid football that saw them promoted the previous season. The Clarets were woeful at both ends of the pitch, winning just five games and finishing the season with a meagre 24 points. And although Kompany insisted that he was “not sulking” after relegation was confirmed, it was admittedly difficult to find positives from a morbid campaign.
Bayern’s big misses
Kompany will now arrive at the Allianz Arena at a turbulent time. Bayern were quick to confirm that they would get rid of Tuchel after he endured a poor spell at the start of 2024 that left the Bavarians trailing in Bayer Leverkusen’s wake in the Bundesliga title race. By making a decision on Tuchel three months out from the end of the campaign, Bayern believed they could get a head-start on finding the best candidate to take over.
Their primary target was the man who was pulling away from them at the top of the table, Xabi Alonso. Having learned under Pep Guardiola during his time as a player in Munich, the Spaniard was making waves at the BayArena, eventually guiding them to an unbeaten Bundesliga campaign and a first-ever league title. Bayern’s history dictates that if they see someone posing a threat to their status as Bundesliga’s top dogs, they will bring them to Bavaria, and it was felt that Alonso would follow that lineage. But it wasn’t to be.
Alonso, who was being coveted with equal vigour by both Liverpool and Bayern, shocked the footballing world in late March when he announced that he would remain Leverkusen manager for at least one more season. A job at a massive club remains on the horizon for 42-year-old; this just wasn’t the right time for him to take one.
Bayern, then, were left scrambling for other options, and turned to Julian Nagelsmann – the man they had sacked only 12 months previously in controversial circumstances. Nagelsmann had since taken over as manager of the Germany national team in late 2023, but with no contract keeping him in the job beyond Euro 2024, there was reason to believe that he would be open to return, especially since CEO Oliver Kahn and sporting director Hasan Salihamidzic, whom he had fallen out with during his final weeks at Bayern, had since been sacked themselves.
However, as speculation over a return grew through April, Nagelsmann made the surprising decision to sign a deal to stay on as Germany boss through to the 2026 World Cup. With their top two options off the table, Bayern went back to the drawing board.
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Rejection after rejection
A bunch of names were mooted as potential candidates as the second wave of Bayern’s search began. Roberto De Zerbi was spoken about after his impressive year in charge of Brighton, while Unai Emery was reportedly someone whom the Bayern board were keen to chat to, only for the Spaniard to sign a new contract at Aston Villa as he closed in on Champions League qualification. Sebastian Hoeness, the former Bayern reserve-team coach who was busy leading Stuttgart into Europe’s premier club competition, also signed a fresh deal just as Bayern glanced in his direction.
With the calendar turning to May, however, it seemed that Bayern had finally found their man, as Austria manager and former Manchester United flop Ralph Rangnick entered discussions with the club. Although the architect of Red Bull’s gegenpressing football had struggled in England, his reputation in Germany remains strong, and he has done a decent job since stepping into international coaching.
However, citing personal reasons, Rangnick turned the job down. Embarrassed, Bayern turned to Oliver Glasner, but were told by Crystal Palace that they would have to pay €100 million (£85m/$108m) to prise the Austrian away from Selhurst Park following his strong start to life with the Eagles.
One final failure
Bayern had explored almost every avenue available to them, and drawn a blank each time. All the while, on the pitch, the team had shown some signs of improvement, especially in the Champions League, where they knocked Arsenal out in the quarter-finals and came within a whisker of seeing off Real Madrid in the semis.
Tuchel was hailed for the way he had set his team up to counter such strong opponents, and thus the club entered talks with the former Chelsea boss to try and find an agreement that would keep him at the club after all. It is believed that the two sides came close to such a deal, but in his final pre-match press conference of the campaign, Tuchel confirmed that the plan for him to depart remained in place.
The 50-year-old is the eighth coach to have either outright rejected the chance to coach Bayern next season or signed a new contract to remain at their current club before the German giants even got the chance to speak to them. To say Kompany is scraping the bottom of the barrel, then, would be putting it lightly.
Could Kompany actually work?
The deal to bring in Kompany has, in contrast to the search for Tuchel’s successor, all happened rather quickly. Bayern first made contact with the Belgian on Monday, and by Wednesday afternoon, Burnley owner Alan Pace was in talks over a compensation package.
There is a world where this works out, too. Kompany, though lacking in top-level experience, has been linked with big jobs before, with his playing career likely meaning he can earn the respect of both owners and players more readily than others his age.
Meanwhile, for all of the criticisms that should be levelled at Burnley’s Premier League performances, there is a sense that his attacking style could work with a more talented squad at his disposal. He showed in the Championship that he knows how to coach front-runners, and it’s not like Bayern won’t be back in the title picture going forward.
His failure to adapt once promotion was secured remains a concern, but the hope is that lessons will have been learned the hard way over the past year, and that Kompany will arrive in Munich as a better coach than the one who oversaw a disastrous campaign in the north-west of England.
Munich mayhem
This ultimately, though, says more about Bayern than it does the man who may or may not enjoy a successful tenure at the helm. For all of the reasons why Kompany may yet be a shrewd appointment, it cannot be ignored that he is effectively their ninth choice for the job.
In truth, mayhem has engulfed the Allianz Arena for more than a year now. Nagelsmann was let go too swiftly when the board removed him from power in March 2023, infamously informing him of his sacking while he was on a skiing holiday.
Since then, things have collapsed. Kahn and Sailihamidzic were sacked on the final day of the 2022-23 season while Bayern celebrated a Borussia Dortmund collapse that handed them a barely-deserved title. A new head of recruitment didn’t arrive in for nine months, while Tuchel saw his methods fail in spectacular fashion. Talks over new deals for key players such as Joshua Kimmich, Alphonso Davies, Leroy Sane and Jamal Musiala are yet to yield any positive outcomes, with Kimmich, Davies and Sane all set to enter the final year of their contracts this summer, leading to reports that they will be sold.
Kompany, then, has a job on his hands, and he may not be to blame if it all goes wrong. As whether he proves to be a diamond in the rough or unqualified failure, his hiring has shown just how desperate things have got at Bayern.
