Inside Vincent Kompany’s success at Bayern Munich: Apple pie, cockatoos and a range of roles

The scene described by Uli Hoeness was idyllic.

It was mid-summer in Tegernsee, back in 2025, and under the Bavarian sun and beside the glassy waters, Vincent Kompany and Christoph Freund had travelled south from Munich to talk transfers and eat some homemade apple pie with Hoeness, Bayern’s honorary president.

On the agenda: Xavi Simons, then of RB Leipzig, whom Kompany and Freund were keen on and had come to lobby for.

But it was not going to happen.

“Vincent,” Hoeness said, as he recalled on the Auf eine weiss-blaue Tasse podcast, “you can have another piece of apple pie, but you’re not getting Xavi.”

Hoeness tells lots of stories about Kompany. In recent months, as the possibility of a Bayern treble has become more realistic, they have grown in frequency. Given his fractious relationship with Thomas Tuchel, Kompany’s predecessor, it’s often tempting to read between the lines. When he speaks of harmonious atmospheres and calm at the club, he is — clearly — drawing a comparison with how things were not when Tuchel was in charge.

But it would be a mistake to see these anecdotes solely through that lens.

The first time the two met was at Kaefer’s, the restaurant and delicatessen in Munich city centre, from where, a year later, an unnamed member of the squad would steal a porcelain cockatoo, now famous for being a prop in the team’s trophy celebrations. But in 2024, the occasion was more formal. Hoeness, Max Eberl and Herbert Hainer — the board member for sport and president respectively — met with Kompany and his father, to discuss the possibility of the former Manchester City centre-back taking over as head coach.

Bayern wanted a statesman and a communicator. Someone with a ball-oriented playing philosophy who could unite the club’s dressing-room, divided in all sorts of ways since Pep Guardiola’s departure in 2016, and forge its disparate personalities into a source of power.

They were looking for quite the package of skills and yet, at that meeting at Kaefer’s, it did not take long for Hoeness to be convinced.

“After half an hour, he recalled on the recent podcast, “I grabbed Max (Eberl) by the knee under the table and gave him a thumbs-up.”

Coaching Bayern is harder than it looks. It is a political job as much as a footballing one, and many fine coaches have fallen short. The Xavi story — with the apple pie in Tegernsee — is pertinent because it’s another window into the role’s complexity.

Hoeness did not want the Dutch playmaker because he feared blocking pathways for players in the club’s academy. A simple instruction, perhaps, but arguments about Bayern’s recruitment policy — and the tools coaches were given to do their jobs — had long since spilled out across the local and national media.

That did not happen with Kompany. Instead, the young players were given a chance. Lennart Karl made his Bundesliga debut and now, injury pending, has every chance of going to the World Cup with Germany. Maycon Cardozo and Cassiano Kiala have made their debuts, as have Erblin Osmani and Bara Ndiaye, a Senegalese midfielder who is the first proper graduate from Red & Gold football, Bayern’s expanding confederacy of partners across the world.

It’s an example of how well Kompany understood his role. More precisely, these anecdotes, collectively, describe how a successful Bayern coach has to have multiple personalities. Some of Kompany’s predecessors have floundered by attempting to force their will on the club, whereas the Belgian has known where and when to be deferential, when to carry himself with his quiet brand of charisma, and when to lead.

It’s the great overarching triumph of the past two years.

The perception of him as ideologically stubborn is not entirely fair, either. During his final season at Burnley, when the club was relegated from the Premier League, he was often accused of naivety and of trying to employ the same attacking tactics that had originally won promotion. In an interview with the Burnley Express, midfielder Josh Brownhill recalled that Kompany did adapt to the challenge at the higher level, claiming also that retaining their short-passing style was as much about the physical profile of the squad as it was philosophy.

Stories about the range of Kompany’s coaching are not in short supply. As has been repeated often, in his first days at Sabener Strasse, Bayern’s training ground, in the summer of 2024, when many senior internationals were still on holiday, the younger players — several from the academy campus — enjoyed his level of instruction and being taught by a coach with Kompany’s playing credentials. After all, many had grown up watching him play with distinction for Manchester City and Belgium.

At the time, the attitude among local media was reserved. Sure, Kompany possessed a certain aura around the young players, all of whom were eager to impress him, but the real test would come when Bayern’s elders returned, with their “seen it all, won it all” attitude and their many, many medals.

But that proved another success. During that first summer, one of Kompany’s first tasks was to tell Leon Goretzka that he should find a new club. Goretzka was a big earner, had a contract that would run until 2026, and Bayern had decided that the time had come to change direction.

Kompany described it as an “honest and tough” conversation. It would have been a delicate one, too, because Goretzka is a big personality and an influential member of the dressing room. By the end of the window, the midfielder had not secured a move away and instead, slowly began his reintegration.

He was bruised. Anybody who watched those early performances and noticed his body language could see that. Nevertheless, by the Winterpause, Goretzka was fully re-integrated, would play extremely well in the second half of the season, and would win a recall to the German national team by the year’s end.

The player himself deserved great recognition for how he handled himself during that period. But so did Kompany. In a way, the same situation has reoccurred; Goretzka will not have his contract renewed and will leave at the end of this season. He had the option to leave in January and was the subject of major interest, but chose instead to see out the final six months at Sabener Strasse and remain part of this push for the treble. An easy decision, perhaps, but one made simpler by the relationship he now enjoys with Kompany.

The Belgian is private. He does not do one-on-one interviews, viewing them as a waste of time that could be spent on the training pitches. As a result, his effect on the team is typically revealed by how others describe it.

In December 2025, Serge Gnabry gave an interview with Sky Deutschland, during which he spoke about the chemistry between Bayern’s attacking players.

“I think all of us feel the same way: we feel comfortable under him and feel the trust,” Gnabry said. “He’s obsessed with repetition and detail, which helps us enormously because we simply know how we play, and it gives us players confidence, and that’s great, of course.”

What seems like a generic quote is actually quite revealing. The Athletic spoke to people who have worked with Kompany or who have represented players who have been coached by him for this article and they all, to a man, spoke of his communication skills and his understanding of how to treat players — when to be respectful and supportive, when to challenge, and when to teach.

Even when to be the coach and when, briefly, to be one of the players again. At the beginning of April, Bayern needed a 99th-minute winner to complete a comeback at Freiburg. The goal was scored by Karl at the back-post, but from an Alphonso Davies cross. Davies has suffered a demoralising season. Since returning from a serious knee injury late in 2025, he has picked up a series of muscular injuries, each more dispiriting than the last.

During the Champions League last-16 tie against Atalanta, he left the pitch in tears, devastated by a hamstring issue. It proved less serious than it seemed, costing him just a few weeks, but his campaign has been so disrupted that the cross against Freiburg might have been his personal high point. As Karl wheeled away to celebrate, Kompany led the entire Bayern bench in a sprint down the Europa-Park touchline to celebrate with Davies, producing one of the most touching scenes of the season.

Outside of Germany, Bayern’s complexity is often under-appreciated. They see a club that sails through the domestic season, effortlessly casting their rivals aside. But a deeper assessment reveals a highly sensitive environment, full of different agendas, egos and personal ambitions, surrounded by a rapacious media and governed by what, at times, can be a nebulous power structure.

Any head coach needs to be emotionally nimble. The demand is for a tactician, a father figure, a figurehead and a statesman, all at the same time, depending on the mood.

Kompany has played all those roles successfully.

Earlier this year, Karl found himself in difficulty twice in quick succession. First, after he made loose comments during a club members’ event, when he admitted that “Real Madrid was his dream club”. Then, just a few weeks later, after an extravagant series of step-overs against Hoffenheim ended embarrassingly, the teenager was mercilessly mocked and, in some quarters, with far too much sincerity, accused of arrogance.

Kompany’s defence of Karl was different each time, but ultimately pitch perfect on both occasions and helped defuse situations which had been blown well out of proportion.

His most prominent moment this season was, of course, his commentary on the racist abuse suffered by Vinicius Junior during Real Madrid’s Champions League playoff against Benfica. Kompany’s monologue has been widely watched and shared, and The Athletic knows of at least one club chairman from European football who contacted Bayern to express his admiration in response.

It was an extraordinary moment. That Kompany was able to articulate his feelings in such a way was not a surprise, not even in a second language. But that he was willing to be quite so honest and forthright, rather than simply offering generic condemnation, spoke to how rare a figure he is in football and — ultimately — to the range of roles he’s able to play.

From easy afternoons in Tegernsee, to the crucible of the technical area, and to the brightest parts of the media spotlight, the scenery is ever changing. Less than two years ago, Bayern were ridiculed for appointing Kompany. He was portrayed as a last act of panic at the end of a period of protracted dysfunction.

As it happens, he was everything the club needed him to be.

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