Injuries are an unfortunate part of football and especially so in youth football. As the body goes through its changes, it can be particularly vulnerable. Bayern Munich are no strangers to this. But the slate of injuries so many of the footballers in the Bavarians’ youth academy had to combat in recent seasons bordered on the ridiculous. The U-23s had to deal with an injury list that ranged into the double digits throughout most of the 2025/26 season, most academy injuries would usually take months
on months to heal while most of those who trained with the first team (Wisdom Mike, David Daiber, Vincent Manuba, Maycon Cardozo, Grayson Dettoni, Cassiano Kiala, etc.) suffered serious muscular injuries.
Lennart Karl’s injury during German national team duty, which ruled him out of the World Cup entirely, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Bayern concluded that this was more than just bad luck. Somebody in the academy fitness department was not doing their job well enough.
According to German news site Tz (as captured by @iMiaSanMia_GER), Bayern have found their culprit(s):
FC Bayern parts ways with Carsten Schünemann (57). He has been head of the athletics department at the Campus since 2019 & has been facing internal criticism for some time. One of the accusations: He deliberately kept qualified athletics trainers in his department down. Furthermore, there was reportedly no clear concept for managing player workload. Example: Wisdom Mike suffered a thigh injury on February 11, 2025, during a Youth League match at Betis Sevilla. In the 2 weeks prior, he rotated through U17, U19, and the senior team without a single day off.
One possible internal solution for the succession is Quirin Löppert, who only joined from FC Augsburg as an athletics and rehab trainer in January. As an external candidate, Johannes Wieber (53) from 1. FC Nürnberg is being considered. He already worked in FC Bayern’s youth academy from 2013 to 2019.
Campus doctor Jan-Philipp Müller is also not without controversy. Long rehab phases without any significant reason repeatedly cause astonishment among players and coaches. For instance, his predicted absence period for Jonathan Asp Jensen in the fall of 2024 turned out to be significantly too long. Initially, there was talk of a 10-week break, but after obtaining a second opinion in Asp Jensen’s home country of Denmark and undergoing a new MRI at the doctors of the professional department, this was shortened to 3 weeks. A topic that concerns both the medical department and the athletic sector was talents being re-injured immediately after making their comeback from a previous injury (e.g. Louis Richter, Chivano Wijks, Vincent Manuba).
BFW Analysis
Certainly, the mismanaged workload could explain why those who train with the first team get injured so frequently, while unexplained lengthy rehab phases could explain why these enforced absences are always so long. It is impossible to to know from the outside if Bayern have indeed identified the right causes of the problems, but it certainly seems possible.
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