What is Bayern’s Competition doing now?

By: Jan | June 12th, 2007

They are apparently doing not much and then why should they? Their teams are intact and they are not yet trembling in fear of the new Bavarian Ubermannschaft. “There is no reason to be awestruck. I don’t see a danger of Bayern dominating the league now”, comments Bremen’s team manager Klaus Allofs and the responses from other clubs have been similarly unagitated. They are currently mostly working on one or two bigger transfers and otherwise seized the services of some potential talents from smaller Bundesliga clubs.

Werder Bremen made use of their buying option for Hugo Almeida and otherwise signed two young players from their second team and goalkeeper Nico Pellatz from Hertha Berlin. Except for Almeida it’s all bench material. The only really big transfer that they are working on is Lyon’s Alou Diarra. They are currently facing competition from Portsmouth and as the ESPN rumour goes Bayern Munich. Very odd news. Probably Bayern just wants to get back at Bremen or it’s simply a hoax. Oh, and there is the ever ominous Miroslav Klose transfer of course. The newest development here is that more and more of his teammates are starting to position themselves against him. Torsten Frings was the first to start a little catfight and now his teammates Tim Borowski and Tim Wiese voiced their opinion that Klose should probably leave the club.

VfB Stuttgart is currently making some headlines since the upper management failed to offer their celebrated team manager Horst Heldt a new contract. They’ve made themselves scarce on the transfer market for now. Nuremberg’s goalkeeper Raphael Schäfer had already been signed to replace Timo Hildebrand a couple of months ago. Hertha Berlin’s Yildiray Bastürk joins the club on a free transfer and will add some depth and creativity to the midfield. They are still looking for a striker. Their interest in SC Heerenveen’s Brazil international Afonso has declined after the club set the transfer fee to 11 million Euros. The same happened with AS St. Etienne’s Bafetimbi Gomis whose asking price rocketed from 3,5 to 10 million Euros. Now they are taking a closer look at Mexican striker Omar Bravo from Guadalajara Chivas whose 2 million Euros price tag is probably much more to the Swabians liking.

The hottest transfer story coming from Schalke revolves around Stephen Appiah. The Fenerbahce midfielder “would fit perfectly into our set-up.” says Schalke’s team manager Andreas Müller. He was quick to curb the enthusiasm of the club’s fans though: “First of all we have to look at the possibilities of a transfer and the economic feasibility of such a transfer.” Schalke is still dealing with a huge debt and is probably not the type of club that could mount a massive bid. The competition for Schalke is quite prominent with Juventus, Celtic and Bayern Munich (WTF!?) according to this BBC article.

Uli Hoeness der Schelm Why is Bayern Munich’s name still popping up in all those transfer rumours? I thought Uli is supposed to be on vacation. The German media is pretty quiet here at the moment. They picked up the Diarra story from ESPN or wherever it originated and haven’t linked the name Appiah with Bayern yet. Probably it’s just some player agent tactics behind it.