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At the end of a long transfer period in Munich and Sinsheim, everything was back to what we were used to. Sebastian Rudy went from Schalke 04 to 1899 Hoffenheim on Monday (October 5, 2020) on loan, he has always enjoyed playing there. Rudy is now a Hoffenheim player for the third time, temporary, but he can still build a record: Rudy is Hoffenheim’s turntable with 227 Bundesliga appearances.
When Hoffenheim introduced Rudy, the atmosphere at Hansi Flick, the Bayern coach, had been excellent for several hours. It was hardly due to Rudy, who was also with Bayern once, but more to Marc Roca, Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting, Bouna Sarr and Douglas Costa. It is these four players who are supposed to give the FC Bayern squad what has previously been lost, despite their individual class: a certain depth.
At the beginning of this 83-day transfer phase, Flick acted as a warning, saying, sometimes more and sometimes less subtly, that the team was too small. Too small. Then Thiago also went to Liverpool, and Flick’s concerns are unlikely to have subsided. Now Flick said he was “super, super happy”.
Bavarians who flirt and then buy
It was like this this summer: Coach Flick, a three-pointer, wanted players, but sports director Hasan Salihamidzic often turned him down. Salihamidzic once said: “We are financially on the edge.” You might think that’s flirty, after all, Bayern is still Bayern, and Leroy Sané still had some money left. Otherwise, however, they stayed in Munich for a long time, they were not alone in the league.
It is a development that is also expressed in numbers. According to the “Transfermarkt.de” portal, the 18 Bundesliga clubs spent 944 million euros on transfers in the summer of 2019 and earned 663 million euros. Now there are expenses of 320 million euros and income of 324 million euros. Of course, it’s still an incredible amount of money, but it’s also a lot less than it was a year ago.
You shouldn’t expect ecstasy in Munich
Bayern were still in a very comfortable situation. His team was small, but very good. And the financial constraints that sporting director Salihamidzic wanted to identify were more of the kind that 17 other Bundesliga clubs would have liked to change. However, names like Roca, Choupo-Moting, Sarr or Costa are not suitable to drive Bayern fans to ecstasy.
Roca is considered a hopeful midfielder, but recently he was with Espanyol Barcelona relegated to the second division. Choupo-Moting had scored a few big goals at PSG, but mostly it was just a substitute. Sarr, they say in France, is a good right-back, but not very good even at 28. And Costa, well, that’s Costa. The Brazilian played for Bayern between 2015 and 2017 before moving to Juve. Uli Hoeneß, then still president of FC Bayern, said a few weeks after saying goodbye to Douglas Costa: “It didn’t work because he was a mercenary and we didn’t like his character.”
Bremen, a loser in this phase of transfers
But the transfer summer also wrote stories that mainly affect non-Bayern clubs. About the Bundesliga and the love of money. We have known for a long time: Covid-19 has also reached football, an industry that really only knew growth. Stand before Corona “Value-added players were requested before”so be it “I’ve already talked much more specifically about numbers” become “the budgets were significantly higher”Mainz sports director Rouven Schröder said in an interview with the sports program a few weeks ago.
Schröder had to experience that with his Mainz team this summer, but the most impressive example is probably his former club Werder Bremen. At Werder they had been communicated all along that they were dependent on transfer income and were betting that someone would buy the great attacker Milot Rashica. Only nobody bought it. There were offers, but no club was willing to pay Bremen a pre-Crown price for Rashica.
Rashica then remained a Werder player, Davy Klaassen is no longer. He returned to Ajax Amsterdam a few hours before the transfer deadline. The transfer was necessary for Werder to fill in the financial holes, but it could still be a problem. Because Bremen could no longer sign a successor. Liverpool FC’s Marko Grujic would have liked to give them up, but the negotiations fell through.
Loan players are all the rage
In general, loans are very popular in the Bundesliga. In the last eight hours of the transfer window alone, the 18 Bundesliga clubs signed ten new loan signings, including such prominent names as Douglas Costa, of course Sebastian Rudy or Leipzig’s Justin Kluivert. There are several reasons why loans are all the rage: clubs sometimes lend to a player if the risk of a permanent transfer is too great for them, but often also when a permanent transfer would not be feasible.
For clubs that still see deficits in their own squad after the end of the transfer period, all that remains is to look at all the players who are currently clubless. Bremen, for example, should have been trying to get Kevin Stöger for a long time. The Austrian is a good footballer, makes great passes, but continues without a new pattern after the end of his contract with Fortuna Düsseldorf.
And Stöger is not the only outstanding player without a club. The names of Fabian Johnson and Philipp Bargfrede can be listed, but Mario Götze must not be forgotten. Yes, Mario Götze, the winning scorer of the 2014 World Cup final, would still be available. These are strange times.
Stall: 05.10.2020, 19:17
