Bayern Munich’s task of finding a suitable replacement for Thomas Tuchel hit a lot of dead ends but finally landed on Vincent Kompany, whose Burnley side were relegated to the EFL Championship. The Belgian was asked by the Bundesliga social media team on the league’s official website about the decision to manage the Bavarians and mentioned that he was used to taking on a new challenge.
“I’ve made big steps all my life. If you draw the comparison with where I have coached then maybe, but if you draw the comparison with where I have lived most of my career in football, then it’s not something I don’t know. The feeling is actually very familiar. At these very big clubs, you can make it about everything around you if you want to look at it that way, but based on my learnings in the past and how you have to approach it, it’s ultimately just 11 players playing against another team with a ball and a set of rules. You have to focus on the things you can control and everything else outside is bigger, but it doesn’t mean you have the capacity to process all of it. You have to just keep doing what you are good at because that’s the reason why you are here.”
The former Manchester City defender highlighted one of the important aspects of his coaching game, which is the knowledge he got from all those years of honing his craft. “The only clarity I can give is that I think you have to coach who you are as a person. That is the biggest thing. I have learned so much from so many brilliant coaches over the years and I have taken some aspects of that because that is how you evolve but, in the end, I could not coach something that I am not as a person.
“My nature is to be creative and brave”, he continued. “I have explained a few times that I come from the streets of Brussels. I have this element that I like to see beautiful football and beautiful players that have the ambition to do something different with the ball than other players. But, at the same time, I was a fairly aggressive player in my career, so I like the game to be physical as well and I like the team to work hard. I like to make it uncomfortable for the opponent and that’s what I always want to achieve because that’s my character.”
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