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Sports director Hasan Salihamidzic
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Tom Weller / dpa
When it comes to winter transfers, the bosses of FC Bayern are rather bored.
Hasan Salihamidzic announced even before the January market opened that nothing special would happen to the future German ten-year long-time champion with a view to the second half of the season.
“That's not an issue at all.
Our squad is top-notch, "said the sports director.
Oliver Kahn's board of directors will still have to tackle urgent personal issues in the first few months of 2022.
The prize question for the Bundesliga autumn champions is: What will become of Niklas Süle, Serge Gnabry, Kingsley Coman or Corentin Tolisso?
Shaping the future will definitely be expensive.
And that in hardly calculable times.
"As a football club, we also manage a two-year pandemic," warns CEO Oliver Kahn.
The new year continues because of the omicron variant with ghost games.
At FC Bayern, an empty arena means a loss of 3.5 million euros per home game.
This complicates the goal of retaining more people in their mid-twenties such as Gnabry (26), Coman (25) and Süle (26) in the longer term after the costly extensions with the executives Joshua Kimmich (contract until 2025) and Leon Goretzka (2026).
Kahn is cautious about Niklas Süle
After the Austrian David Alaba, who went to Real Madrid last summer, national defender Süle and the former 41.5 million euro record transfer Tolisso could go free at the end of the season.
Süle has stabilized his performance under coach Julian Nagelsmann again.
But he is also said to have a weakness for the English Premier League.
Nagelsmann speculated that "there is a market" for the angular central defender.
Kahn was reluctant to comment on Süle's whereabouts: "It is important that we find a basis where it can work for both sides."
"I would like nothing more than to have him extended," said Nagelsmann to Gnabry after Gnabry's most recent three-goal gala at 5-0 in Stuttgart.
The coach also raves about Coman.
The Frenchman is "one of the top wingers on the planet".
And that's why Nagelsmann (contract until 2026) would "like to work together for many years to come" with Coman.
Time is of the essence: Gnabry and Coman should not go into the coming season without a transfer if possible.
For the 27-year-old Tolisso, Bayern will not exhaust their budget.
In four and a half years, the repeatedly injured world champion was only on the field in 64 of 151 possible league games.
The French never managed to be important in the long term.
He can be replaced in midfield;
behind Kimmich and Goretzka there are alternatives in Marcel Sabitzer and Marc Roca.
At the end of the first half even Jamal Musiala successfully helped out in the sixth position.
Nagelsmann's current workforce is sufficient for the second half of the season.
"If you take the last six months, I'm glad we had the squad the way we have it, because we needed every player," he said at his half-time conclusion.
With Tolisso a transfer could still be achieved in January.
The first candidate, at least for a loan, is Michael Cuisance.
ara / dpa