Bayern Munich sporting director Max Eberl has acknowledged he never pitched Vincent Kompany as his first choice, worried the Belgian would not clear the room.
In an interview with Bayern’s members’ magazine “51”, picked up across European reporting in late October, Eberl walked through a hire that has since delivered back-to-back Bundesliga titles. Kompany was his man all along, but the paper trail at the Säbener Strasse went through other names first.
“If I had presented Vincent Kompany as my very first choice, I don’t know what the reaction would have been,” Eberl said, as reported by Yahoo Sports.
Julian Nagelsmann, the club’s own former coach, was sounded out before he committed to the Germany national team. Talks with Ralf Rangnick went in a different direction. Only once the established options had closed did Eberl pick up the phone himself.
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A four-hour call before Madrid
The first proper conversation came in the final weeks of the 2023-24 season, with Kompany’s Burnley heading for Premier League relegation. Eberl called from Madrid, where Bayern were preparing for a Champions League semi-final against Real, and the two talked for roughly four hours before he had to cut things off, according to Goal.com.
“After four hours, I had to say: ‘Sorry, it’s 6pm, I have to go to a meeting,’” Eberl told the magazine.
Relegation would have put off plenty of sporting directors. Eberl says it worked the other way: he liked that Kompany had kept trying to play out from the back at a side being battered week after week, instead of parking eight men in front of his goalkeeper.
The Guardiola reference
Winning the room still required outside help. Eberl asked honorary president Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and club president Uli Hoeness, both of whom have a close working relationship with Pep Guardiola, to call the then Manchester City manager and ask what he thought of his former captain.
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The feedback came back within hours and was unambiguous. Kompany was already on City’s own internal list of potential successors to Guardiola. That endorsement, confirmed in earlier ESPN reporting, was the door-opener that convinced the rest of Bayern’s leadership to sign off.
A 3am standoff in Manchester
With the board in line, Eberl and sporting director Christoph Freund flew to Manchester to close the deal. Talks ran deep into the night. At 3am, Kompany asked for time to sleep on it and speak to his wife, and Eberl, under instruction from Hoeness not to leave the house without a signature, stretched out on the sofa until the agreement came the next morning.
Two titles later
Kompany has won the Bundesliga in each of his seasons in charge. Bayern reclaimed the title from Bayer Leverkusen in 2024-25, then successfully defended it in 2025-26, sealing the trophy on 19 April with a 4-2 win at Stuttgart and four matches still to play.
He is currently absent from the touchline after collapsing during a training session on 25 October. Bayern have confirmed meningeal irritation as the cause and said he was discharged from hospital three days later, with assistant Aaron Danks taking charge of matchdays in the meantime. Bayern travel to Mainz on Saturday 7 November, with the home fixture against FC Köln on Friday 20 November the first match after the international break.
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