Bayern München are bracing for a spell without Vincent Kompany on the touchline. The head coach remains in hospital after collapsing at the club’s training ground on Friday, and board member for sport Max Eberl has made clear that the champions are planning for an absence measured in weeks rather than days.
The first game of that new reality went to plan. With assistant Aaron Danks in charge of the dugout, Bayern won 3-1 at Freiburg on Sunday to move back to the top of the Bundesliga, and the first person to send his congratulations was the man watching from a hospital bed.
No diagnosis yet as tests go on
Kompany fell ill while watching a session of Bayern’s second team on Friday and was taken to hospital. Speaking in Freiburg, Eberl gave an update on his condition. “He’s stable. He no longer has a headache,” he said, before adding: “There’s no diagnosis, nothing final yet,” as reported by AFP via France 24.
According to the PA match report carried by ESPN, the 40-year-old was still in a stable condition in hospital, and Eberl expects his absence to run to weeks. The club has not put a date on his return, and Eberl stressed that Kompany will be given whatever time he needs to recover.
A WhatsApp message from the hospital
Danks revealed that his boss had been following the game closely. “I saw a WhatsApp message from Vince there, in which he’d written ‘well done’. He was pleased, so I simply replied: ‘Brilliant. Now get some rest.’ And I sent him a kiss emoji,” Danks said in comments published by FC Bayern.
On the pitch, the stand-in setup held firm. Dayot Upamecano opened the scoring after winning possession on the edge of his own box and driving forward on the counter himself, and Serge Gnabry made it 2-0 shortly before the break with his 100th Bundesliga goal. Freiburg pulled one back late on through a Tom Bischof own goal, but Michael Olise settled it in stoppage time.
Eberl called it “a bigger win than just three points”, and the numbers back up how controlled Bayern were for long spells. Both sides had 17 shots, yet the club’s own figures credit the visitors with an expected goals total of 2.99 against 1.05. Bayern are now 22 Bundesliga games unbeaten and sit level on 17 points with Borussia Dortmund.
A heavy week ahead without the head coach
The timing is far from ideal. Kompany’s side were already without a long list of senior players in Freiburg, including captain Manuel Neuer, Luis Díaz, Jamal Musiala, Aleksandar Pavlović and Kim Min-jae, while Joshua Kimmich was absent on compassionate leave following the death of his father.
Danks will now lead the group through a demanding run. Bundesliga 2 side Magdeburg visit the Allianz Arena in the DFB-Pokal on Wednesday, Dortmund come to Munich for a top-of-the-table Klassiker on Saturday, and a Champions League trip to Atlético Madrid follows days later. Bayern’s last outing in Europe, a 2-2 draw with Arsenal, was one of the final matches Kompany oversaw before falling ill. For a closer look at how his side approach the Dortmund fixture, our tactical analysis of last season’s 3-2 win at Signal Iduna Park shows the pressing structure that Kompany built and that his staff now have to keep running.
