If you look at the Bayern Munich trophy cabinet, the number of trophies is staggering: 27 Bundesliga titles, 18 DFB Cups and five UEFA Champions League crowns. If you look at the Bundesliga table in the last 10 years, the Bavarians have always finished as winners. So what would an average fan (or senior executive) complain about when it comes to Bayern? The Academy. This is the only category in which CEO Oliver Kahn and sporting director Hasan Salihamidzic have failed. To be precise, their predecessors, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Matthias Sammer didn’t do a good job either. As a result, Bayern Munich is still full of trophies but has to spend a lot more money than other clubs. The German champion is far behind in the youth category department and clubs like Ajax, Borussia Dortmund, Leipzig and others produced more talent and got some serious money from them. Even the bigger clubs like Manchester City and Chelsea have invested more, and even thou they still don’t have so many academy players in the first team, they can at least earn on selling them for higher value. So, what is wrong?It’s not a joke: a 16-year old German turns down Bayern MunichIf you look at the famous Bayern players who came from the academy, the list is big: Franz Beckenbauer, Klaus Augenthaler, Philipp Lahm, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Toni Kroos, Thomas Muller, David Alaba….But, those numbers are few and between. The last one was Alaba, who went to Real Madrid as a free agent. In August 2017, Bayern Munich opened a new state-of-the-art academy, the FC Bayern Campus, with then-president Uli Hoeness stating that this will revolutionize the youth department.“In the last few years, the results of our work haven’t been good. No player has even come close to making the first team since David Alaba. The new FC Bayern Campus will also provide one answer to the current transfer madness and the explosion of salaries” said Hoeness. Needless to say, that didn’t happen five years later.Bild | Bayern’s new strategy for the upcoming years:1- Sign ready made stars for up to between €80m and €100m.2- Go back to producing talent in the club’s new youth academy.3- Continue to poach young talents from other clubs and developing them. pic.twitter.com/djiIuKTFt8— Bayern & Germany (@iMiaSanMia) January 18, 2018 “It is our goal to develop youth players who have the potential to become rightful successors of players like Bastian Schweinsteiger, Philipp Lahm, Thomas Muller, David Alaba or Toni Kroos into pros for FC Bayern,” Kahn told Sport Bild in 2020, when he became chairman. But…Flop of the century: Paid 18 million, played 0 minutesSince then, nobody from the youth team became a first team player, not to mention a regular in the first 11. The best they came up with was buying good young players on the cheap and then developing them, but even in that segment they have only two: Alphonso Davies and Jamal Musiala. The Canadian defender was bought for 10 million euros, while the former Chelsea youth product costed only 200.000 euros. Maybe one of the reasons lay in the fact that Bayern simply cannot risk giving their youth players a chance with all this pressure and a ‘win now’ mode. Moreover, former CEO Karl-Heinz Rummenigge publicly confirmed his stance on how Bayern academy should work.It‘s so difficult to break through as a young player at Bayern when you’ve played in the academy. Davies and Musiala are the only ones who did it since David Alaba (2011). My starboys 💎💎 pic.twitter.com/kYzyuti61r— Deniz (@MusialaEra) May 9, 2022 “We don’t want to bring some 10- or 11-year-old to Munich like the English do. You could almost consider it kidnapping and I would have moral reservations about that. I believe 14 is a good age for a youngster to come to Bayern. It’s a long, steep, rocky road to the Allianz Arena — but it’s worth it in the end. We would rather see our future stars come from Rosenheim in Bavaria rather than Rio. Our priority will certainly be Germany and Bavaria. We want to focus on the absolute elite rather than a broader group. I know that Manchester City can train up to 250 players at their facility, together with their parents. It’s virtually like a real-life village. But we want to be more cautious. We don’t want a football factory” he said a couple years ago.Bayern snatch PSG’s most talented kidLooking at the result of that strategy, it’s easy to see it just didn’t work. Bayern have no local stars from Bavaria, in fact, they don’t have any stars from the academy at the moment. So in the end, they decided to shop from other countries after all. Ayman Kari (17 years old, central midfielder, Paris Saint-Germain) came this July and they managed to snatch Hertha’s 16-year-old prodigy midfielder Noel Aseko Nkili. They also tried to get the 16-year-old Andy Breuer from third tier Saarbrucken, but the kid turned them down.##NAJAVA_MECA_6677273##
