Max Eberl kept the conversation off the pitch.
“He is stable. I visited him on Saturday. We talked about life; we didn’t talk about football, the starting XI or the Bundesliga,” the Bayern Munich board member for sport told Sky Germany on Sunday.
Kompany is “doing well under the circumstances”, Eberl added, but the medical team has yet to pin down what triggered the collapse that put the Belgian in a Munich hospital bed on Friday. The club’s own statement on the day said only that Kompany was undergoing a thorough examination and would remain under medical care until further notice.
Eberl has avoided numbers of any kind on the recovery, except one.
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“We won’t be talking about days, but weeks,” he said at the weekend, a line he has now repeated several times.
The sequence Eberl described is simple and open-ended: find out exactly what it is, then let the treatment run, then wait for Kompany to feel strong enough to come back.
Bayern win 3-1 at Freiburg under Danks
While Kompany watched from his hospital room, Bayern beat Freiburg 3-1 at the Europa-Park Stadion on Sunday and climbed back to the top of the Bundesliga on goal difference. Dayot Upamecano and Serge Gnabry had the game under control at half-time; a Tom Bischof own-goal eight minutes from the end set up a nervous finish before Michael Olise struck in stoppage time to settle it.
Assistant coach Aaron Danks ran the touchline. He told reporters afterwards that Kompany was improving “day by day“, and that a message had come through within minutes of the final whistle.
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“I just looked at my phone and had a WhatsApp from Vince saying, ‘Well done,’ and he was happy,” Danks said.
Kompany’s warning before the collapse
Kompany, 40, had publicly flagged the risk himself before any of this. After Bayern’s Champions League tie with Arsenal on Wednesday, he admitted he had been fighting a virus for days and chose to keep going anyway.
“I caught a pretty nasty virus last week, and of course, I didn’t listen to my body, and then at some point my body just said, ‘enough is enough!’”
Two days later, during a reserve-team training session at Säbener Straße, he collapsed and was taken straight to hospital. Eberl, who stepped away from football for months during his time at Borussia Mönchengladbach, pointed to the pattern afterwards: ignore the quiet signals your body sends, and eventually it will scream.
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No timeline before Der Klassiker
Bayern host Borussia Dortmund in Der Klassiker on Saturday, with the DFB-Pokal tie at home against Magdeburg on Wednesday evening in between. Danks will be in charge of both. Eberl has committed to no date, no diagnosis and no treatment plan, only that Kompany returns when he is full of energy and healthy again.
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