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UCL Champions League Drama Vincent Kompany's success at Bayern Munich has surprised many observers Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images It is, arguably, the game of the season so far. Bayern Munich are in London this week, preparing to face Arsenal in the Champions League. Wednesday’s match brings together two of the three teams still boasting 100 per cent records in European football’s marquee club competition, and also the runaway leaders of the English and German top flights. Advertisement For Bayern, the trip to the Emirates Stadium will be the toughest examination yet of their unbeaten record. Their season started with 16 straight wins and they are now undefeated in its first 18 matches, including 17 victories; the only blemish being a 2-2 draw away to Union Berlin at the beginning of this month. The power is back on in Bavaria, and Vincent Kompany is the coach responsible. When he was appointed in late May 2024, having just been relegated from the Premier League with Burnley, Kompany was painted as a panic hire in the face of dwindling options and predicted by some to be out of work by that season’s winter break. Eighteen months later, he is a Bundesliga champion, has had his initial three-year contract extended by another two, and oversees a team playing as well as any in Europe. The Athletic has spoken to multiple sources with knowledge of Kompany and his methods, both at Bayern and at his previous clubs — who asked to remain anonymous to protect their relationships — to understand how he became one of the continent’s brightest managerial prospects. Is Kompany’s success at Bayern a shock? Maybe not. It was August 25 last year, and under the towers of the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, he had just won on his debut as a Bundesliga manager. It had not been convincing: Bayern had been behind in the second half and struggled through some defensive blunders to survive, eventually taking the points, 3-2, but it was hardly a show of strength. The preceding weeks had been positive. Bayern were impressed that Kompany had negotiated his contract without the services of an agent. On the training pitches, the young players who had not been involved in the European Championship and reported back early to Bayern’s base in southern Munich were similarly upbeat. They enjoyed the intensity of sessions and the atmosphere in which they occurred — a big deal was made of Kompany allowing music to be played during these drills — and the level of individual instruction on offer from the new coaching team. Advertisement But those were the kind of micro-positives that sustain fans during the off-season. How would Kompany respond once his team had been examined for real by a local media that can be brutally unsparing towards Bayern coaches? He took his seat for the post-match press conference that day in Wolfsburg and it was then, perhaps, that he started to become Bayern’s head coach for real. He pivoted smartly between German and English, evaluating the game, and directing the gathered reporters towards what he felt were the real talking points. “I want to put forward the outstanding mentality of the team, ” he said, “because I didn’t feel like they ever felt sorry for themselves. ” If others were not convinced that the 38-year-old Belgian was big enough for the job, he did not seem to share their scepticism. He was very at ease in those early dealings with the media, perhaps unsurprisingly given one of Kompany’s selling points to Bayern was the quality of his communication. He was happy to talk about tactics and confident enough to express what he felt the focus should be after a game. That’s a difficult balance. Bayern coaches need charisma and charm to be strident with the media. But Kompany has long had those virtues. When his Manchester City career ended in 2019, he returned to Anderlecht in Brussels — his boyhood club in the city of his birth — as a player-coach, before retiring to become their head coach a year later. His arrival was a coup given Kompany’s status in Belgium, for whom he played 89 times, often as captain, and his two seasons in charge were well above par. He finished third in the Belgian Pro League with an Anderlecht team that was not especially talented — teenagers Jeremy Doku and Albert Sambi Lokonga were really the only players of note — and reached the final of the domestic cup. Advertisement There were teething issues. Journalists who covered those first steps recall he was authoritative and calm, but that he was occasionally guilty of pushing too hard and demanding too much. In the early days, he would be at the training ground by 5am and not leave until 11pm, while his perfectionism could also make him challenging for young players. Kompany had played at the highest level of the game and worked for Pep Guardiola, one of the most demanding coaches of any generation. He had grown used to a way of doing things that worked better at the top of the Premier League than it did in domestic Belgian football, with players of lesser quality. As a teenager, Kompany had been laidback. He was the sort of academy player who would occasionally forget an ID card before a trip, so he understood the importance of not allowing young footballers to become nonchalant. With Bayern last year, there was a surprise in those initial months in that Kompany was extremely deferential. Thomas Tuchel, his predecessor, had started fires everywhere, criticising players, transfer policy, and even club elders. Tuchel’s only full season as Bayern coach featured a running battle with Uli Hoeness, the club’s honorary president, through the media about player development. Right from the beginning of his tenure, Kompany presented as an employee willing to work within the club structure. Ahead of a pre-season game against Tottenham Hotspur in South Korea that July, he was asked about the strength of his squad and future arrivals. Those, he said, were questions for Max Eberl and Christoph Freund, the club’s board member for sport and sporting director respectively. It was smart, but not inevitable. Many of the anecdotes from Kompany’s career — both in his latter days as a player and formative months and years as a coach — describe someone with professional curiosity, unlikely to settle for being a cog in a bigger machine. Advertisement While his two years managing Burnley (whom he joined from Anderlecht in 2022) have been simplified to promotion, relegation, dogmatic attacking football, and that famously angry clip from the club’s TV documentary series, where he eviscerated Johann Berg Gudmundsson, the detail spoke to something else.

Both in the Championship and the Premier League, Kompany involved himself in nearly every process affecting the club. He was smart. He liked stepping out of his comfort zone and trying to master whatever he was confronted with. It was an established trait. While still a player at City, he studied for five years to earn a Global MBA from Alliance Manchester Business School, graduating with a merit and a distinction for his final project. That comfort in different environments was seen at Burnley, where he once dropped into a board meeting. He sat briefly, listened, and by the end was contributing, demonstrating a level of commercial understanding that surprised many. He was frequently involved in scouting and often took trips to make personal checks on potential signings. Many of the people who remember that time depict someone preparing to become a director of football, with a broader perspective on how a club should run. Rather than being siloed off, Burnley’s scouts and recruitment staff were often involved in team meetings, the logic being that keeping them close to the team made them better at identifying what it needed. When he took over in the weeks following Burnley’s relegation from the Premier League, he inherited players who had been coached in a very specific way over several years by predecessor Sean Dyche. There were many departures from the squad after the Lancashire club dropped down to the second tier, but to those who remained, it was clear that Kompany wanted them to forget most of what they had grown used to. For instance, when he urged the defence to take much higher starting positions from opposition goal kicks and squeeze the space available, he used video clips to prove to the affected players that they would have time to react should the other team respond by playing direct. He was rigid in his beliefs, certainly, but committed to explaining why he was right, rather than just insisting that he was. That lasts to this day. At Bayern, there is still plenty of the intensity that characterised Kompany at the beginning of his coaching career, but he has eased off in some areas. Having been a player for so long, he knows when professionals would benefit from more freedom, and that’s become part of his coaching repertoire. Advertisement His hours are still onerous. Last season, he would begin his opposition video analysis immediately after the previous game finished, on the coach or plane ride back. At times, he and his staff would watch entire matches as many as three times, as they looked to develop Bayern’s chance creation and lift their defensive standards. That individual focus on players has remained, too. Speaking to French newspaper L’Equipe during the most recent international break, France centre-back Dayot Upamecano — who has been in the form of his career over the past 12 months — credited Kompany’s hands-on approach for his improvement. “He really helped me with my positioning (in the defensive line), my body positioning, and how and when to approach the long balls, ” Upamecano said. “We got straight to work from day one. ” But while the team’s dominant performances show the work Kompany has done on the training pitch, an underrated part of his success has been more subtle. Coaches who roam into different departments and try to take over the club tend to make enemies quickly at Bayern. That has not happened with Kompany, whose authority has grown with his performance and the extension of his contract, which now runs to 2029. He has not tried to be anything more than a head coach, and while that seems logical, not all of his predecessors have navigated the club’s sensitive politics as well. One of the advantages he has is that he rarely creates any sort of controversy and seldom grants one-on-one interviews. He sees them as time spent away from the training pitch. That plays extremely well with Bayern’s executives. As Hoeness said recently to German newspaper Bild: “He has a few advantages (over Bayern’s recent head coaches). For example, you journalists now actually have to work again. The previous coaches here always gave you something to talk about for weeks. That’s not the case with him because he wants to talk about football, and that’s good for FC Bayern as a whole. ” Advertisement Hoeness had one eye on old foe Tuchel when he made that comment, but he was not wrong. It’s hard to think of a time in the recent past when a Bayern manager was not embroiled in conflict with one of the players or another figure at the club. Tuchel, for instance, as England’s players have learned since he took that job, was happy to discuss his squad’s weaknesses in public. Kompany never does that. He’s old-fashioned in a sense, and is never openly critical of his players in front of the media. “Don’t believe the hype, don’t believe the drama” has become a mantra encouraged around the training ground, and that soft sell is, in part, responsible for a squad that looks tougher this season. “We’ve gone through several different transition phases, or at least that’s how it feels. And since Pep Guardiola (left in 2016), the connection between coach and team just hasn’t clicked, ” Thomas Muller, the club’s former midfielder, told Bundesliga. com in April, shortly before he departed to MLS side Vancouver Whitecaps after 25 years with Bayern from the age of 10. “This completely harmonious environment that we’ve seen again this season, this unity between coach, team and club — that was never really there before. ” Given the range of personalities this squad includes — veterans, serial winners, national-team captains, prodigious youngsters, and careers that had previously wandered off-course — bringing it together has been no small task. Nor has Bayern’s restoration as true contenders to win the Champions League, but that is what Kompany has achieved in 18 months. It has happened quietly, but it’s quite a body of work. Additional reporting: Jordan Campbell and Andy Jones Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle