Club World Cup team guide – Bayern Munich: A powerhouse progressing under Kompany

New York Times

18 hours ago

The inaugural Club World Cup kicks off in the United States on June 14, with its 32 teams split into eight groups of four for the opening phase.
As part of our guides to the sides who will feature in this summer's tournament, Seb Stafford-Bloor gives you the background on Bayern Munich.
Bayern are the 34-time German national champions. Only one of those titles was won before the domestic league's current Bundesliga structure came into place in 1963. In the years since, they have won the title in 33 of the 62 league seasons contested (53 per cent), including 12 of the last 13. They are also six-time European champions and won the Club World Cup twice in its former guise as an annual event.
They are on their way back.
Bayern's imperial era ran from 2012 to 2023, when they won 11 straight Bundesliga titles. They also won the Champions League in 2020, but had been in decline for a few years before Bayer Leverkusen ended their domestic dominance in 2024. Last season saw them reclaim the Bundesliga, though, and make big strides in the right direction.
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Their domestic success still needs context. Bayern have won more Bundesliga titles than every other German team combined. They also enjoy a significant financial advantage over even their nearest rivals; Bayern hold the country's transfer record, with the €95million (£80.1m/$108.5m at current rates) spent on English striker Harry Kane in 2023, and have completed eight of the most expensive incoming deals in German football history.
It's hegemony whichever way you look at it and so European competition, not domestic, will always be the measure of how good Bayern are. They made limited progress back towards the top in the 2024-25 Champions League, with eventual finalists Inter eliminating them at the quarter-final stage, while showing they still possess too many flaws to be considered a truly elite team.
First-year head coach Vincent Kompany inherited a weak defensive group full of issues he is yet to cure and the centre of his midfield lacks the muscularity and definition that the club had there under some of his predecessors.
So, this is still a team between eras. Bayern are good, but they are not as outstanding as they were.
Through their placement in European football governing body UEFA's four-year ranking, having got as far as the Champions League quarter-finals three times and the semis once in that time.
They want the ball, and they want control.
A feature of their attacking play under Kompany has been to use attackers Jamal Musiala and Kane in deeper positions, often receiving passes well inside their own half, and then deploying their respective playmaking attributes at the start of moves, rather than just at the end of them.
The wide forwards, particularly Michael Olise, are especially important and provide a lot of movement and thrust in the attacking third. With influential and incendiary full-back Alphonso Davies unavailable through long-term injury, Bayern will be even more reliant on Olise at this tournament.
Elsewhere, Joshua Kimmich is the heart of the midfield and will want to orchestrate the possession phases from the middle of the pitch. Leon Goretzka, who will likely start alongside him, is a more vertical, physical player who will occupy a deeper No 8 role and arrive late into the opponents' penalty box.
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One of Kompany's successes has been to vastly improve his players' work without the ball. Bayern are a high-pressing team who will try to lock opponents into their own third or force them to play long to get out of it. Are they always good at doing this? No. It's a work in progress, and that could still be a weakness.
Kompany, the former Manchester City captain and one of the finest central defenders of his era, was a surprise choice when he was appointed in 2024.
He came to Bayern directly from a Premier League relegation with Burnley and without any major trophies on his managerial record. The now-39-year-old Belgian was seen as lacking the credentials for the role, and his arrival was met with plenty of doom prophecies.
But he has exceeded expectations. The players like him, and the younger ones have enjoyed his communication style and the instructive, detailed nature of his coaching.
Off the pitch, he has adapted well to the environment. Bayern are always fraught with political issues and Kompany has navigated them smartly, staying away from the public arguments and media rucks that so undermined his predecessor Thomas Tuchel.
Olise was Bayern's best player last season and Kane their top scorer, but Musiala is the star.
The 22-year-old is a doubt for this tournament having not played since a hamstring injury in April, but at his best he is a fabulously gifted playmaker and one of the most elusive ball-carriers in European football. He had already equalled his best goalscoring season before that injury, too, a measure of not just his form but also the evolution in his game under Kompany.
Olise is one of them. He was signed from Crystal Palace of the Premier League last summer, and even though he cost €50million, a big fee in Bundesliga terms, there was a sense he was coming in as a two- or three-year project, rather than as an immediate difference-maker.
As it happened, Olise was outstanding almost from the get-go. He was one of the reasons Bayern were more watchable, more subtle and ultimately more dangerous than their 2023-24 team had been. The London-born France international is right on the cusp of stardom.
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Bayern fans would also point to Aleksandar Pavlovic. The 21-year-old is a deep midfielder with a lovely feel for the game. His season was disrupted by a series of minor injuries and a bout of glandular fever, but when fit and healthy he passes the ball as well as anyone at the club and seems likely to be at the heart of their team for the next decade.
And he's homegrown, too. Pavlovic was born in Munich and developed by Bayern's youth academy — something that already makes him extremely popular with their supporters.
There are different answers to this.
Locally, Munich is a two-club city, comprising Bayern, the Reds, and 1860 Munich, the Blues.
However, 1860 have been plagued by financial dysfunction during the modern era and have fallen on hard times, currently playing in the 3.Liga, German football's third tier. As a measure of how dormant the rivalry is, the two teams have not faced each other since 2008 — a year before Thomas Muller, who will leave Bayern this summer as their record appearance-maker with 751 (so far), had even made his competitive debut.
Borussia Dortmund are a rival of sorts, even though Der Klassiker, as games between the two are called, is more of a marketing construct than a reality. Dortmund, a six-hour drive from Munich, would certainly consider neighbours Schalke to be their biggest rivals, though they are in Germany's second division.
Bayer Leverkusen's rise under Xabi Alonso has made them a rival, with recent seasons breeding animosity among the respective players and even some rival board members, but that is very new and likely to disappear as quickly as it appeared with Alonso now gone to manage Real Madrid and Leverkusen selling star players.
Bayern and Borussia Monchengladbach had a fascinating back-and-forth in the 1970s.
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It was a political rivalry in a sense. In public perception, Bayern were the established power and Gladbach the younger, free-spirited challenger. The latter's informal nickname, 'the foals', is a reference to those teams and their coltish youth. But those dynamics have been embellished and do not bear much scrutiny at all — Bayern's teams of that era scored lots of goals and were full of rebellious, counter-culture characters.
The rivalry was real enough, though, and games between the two have a habit of producing strange results, even today.
Bayern were formed in response to pejorative attitudes towards competitive football. The club's 11 original members had originally belonged to Manner-Turn-Verein 1878 (MTV) and were the footballing department of what was principally a gymnastics club.
At the beginning of the 20th century, organised gymnastics — 'turnen' — was wildly popular in Germany, and seen as a way of fostering collective, nationalistic spirit. By contrast, football was a game imported from England which bred competitive instincts many saw as vulgar.
So, in February 1900, when MTV's football players moved to start playing competitive games and indicated their desire to join the local football association, their fellow members were aghast. In response to an impasse over the issue at a club meeting, the footballers walked out, went down the street to a nearby restaurant, and founded Football-Club Bayern Munchen.
You can still visit the place in the city where it happened. The restaurant itself is long gone and most of the area looks very different, having been rebuilt after the bombing during the Second World War, but there's an obelisk marking the spot just a few yards from Odeonsplatz square, upon which the club's founding document is mounted.
They are still majority-owned by their members.
Business-world giants Audi, Adidas and Allianz each owns an 8.33 per cent stake in Bayern's football division, but the club's fans retain voting control. Bayern are a commercial powerhouse and hardly an underdog, but in a football world of sovereign wealth funds, sports washing and troubling morality, they manage to exist as a superclub without ethical quandaries.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Kelsea Petersen)