Has the Real Madrid controversy blown over yet? Life is starting to return to normal for Bayern Munich wunderkind Lennart Karl after he inadvertently made headlines making a meal of his other dream club
— and at that, only when asked if he had any outside of the German record champions.
The 17-year-old enjoyed the punctuating goal in a January road win over FC Köln and remains one of the team’s budding talents, with the full trust of his coach.
And Vincent Kompany played no small part in putting out the fire with how he handled the brouhaha.
“I tried to look at it from a distance. I’m looking at the bigger picture and the context: what’s a 17-year-old Lennart Karl doing every day? He trains well and really hard — how many 17 year olds are doing that? He works extremely hard for the team defensively, he delivers every single day in training, games and in meetings,” Kompany reflected ahead of Bayern’s 8-1 thumping of Wolfsburg, less than a week after Karl’s initial comments (as captured via @iMiaSanMia). “Maybe he made a small communication mistake, but the bigger picture for him at 17: he’s still focused on the right things. He had a really good training week. He’s done so much to earn his minutes.
“He called [sporting director] Christoph [Freund] and [executive board member for sport] Max [Eberl] straight away and apologized for what he said. I tried to be the only person who doesn’t talk to him about this. TikTok spoke about this, Instagram spoke, Bild spoke, Kicker, Sky, whatever, everyone had an opinion. So I tried to be the only one who doesn’t speak to him about it. His teammates teased him a bit about it — it was fun.
“If he trains badly then he has a problem with me. If he doesn’t give 100% then he has a problem with me. But he did the opposite, he trained and played really well and worked really hard. He apologized. It’s still okay for me.”
A small communication mistake is exactly the right way to describe it. Karl is here and giving his all for FC Bayern. And it is clear that the road in Bavaria is long ahead of him still. Let’s enjoy the journey.
If you are looking for more Bayern Munich and German national team coverage, check out the latest episodes of Bavarian Podcast Works, which you can get on Acast, Spotify, Apple, or any leading podcast distributor…
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