How Kompany is paving the way for black coaches at Bayern
Source: http://www.richportaltv.com
Six months into his managerial tenure, Vincent Kompany’s Bayern Munich team leads the Bundesliga by eight points and is poised to reclaim the championship they lost to Bayer Leverkusen the previous season.
After Bayern finished the 2023–24 season in third place, 18 points behind the leaders under Thomas Tuchel, their lowest league finish since 2010–11, the 38-year-old coach was hired.
Kompany was only the second black manager in any of Germany’s professional football leagues and the first black manager in the Bundesliga.
However, he is not the first in his family to make history as a Black pioneer. Kompany’s father, Pierre, arrived in Belgium in 1975 as a refugee from what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo and went on to be elected as the country’s first black mayor when he topped the poll for the municipality of Ganshoren in Brussels in 2018.
He and others are “galvanized by the potential for success” of Kompany, who he hopes will “pave the way” for others, according to Troy Townsend, the former head of development at Kick It Out.
Presenter Eli Mengem examines what has shaped Kompany into the man he is today and how the Belgian has become a role model for black coaches in a Football Daily feature on BBC Radio 5 Live.
He claims that “we were immediately sure we had a terrific player.”
Along with players like Eden Hazard, Kevin de Bruyne, Thibaut Courtois, Jan Vertonghen, and Romelu Lukaku, Kompany was a member of a golden age of Belgian football players.
Broos, who won three European trophies with Anderlecht and currently manages the South African national team, adds, “Vincent was even a little bit higher than all those guys.”
After winning the Belgian championship twice in three seasons with Anderlecht, Kompany was courted by big Premier League clubs, including Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United and Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea.
However, in 2006, aged 21, he opted instead to join German side Hamburg for a then club-record fee of about £7m.
He endured a tough start in the Bundesliga, picking up an injury straight away while the club got into a relegation battle.
It was also during his time in Germany that his mother passed away and his sister got cancer.
As the podcast delves into, Kompany’s mother, Jocelyne, a trade unionist, played a significant role in instilling the socially conscious principles he displayed while working at City when he collaborated with Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, to combat homelessness.
Kompany has previously stated that he learned to “remain modest on the way up” during his challenging time at Hamburg.
Perhaps that was the best thing he could have done. Discipline. He needed that right then. “That was fortunate,” Broos says.
“That changed him a little bit, and it was maybe that change that he needed to become the player he became.”
After working as head coach at his boyhood club Anderlecht, Kompany earned plaudits for bringing Burnley back to the Premier League in 2022-23 by playing an impressive brand of attacking, possession-based football.
During his season in the Premier League, Kompany was one of only two black managers in the English top flight—alongside Nottingham Forest manager Nuno Espirito Santo.
Now, having become the first black manager to work in the Bundesliga, Kompany is on course to make more history by winning it.
Anti-racism campaigner Townsend says that black managers have to work “twice as hard” for opportunities but believes that Kompany has long been seen as a leader.
“He was spoken about as leadership material a long time before he went into management,” says Townsend.
“Vincent was made a captain, and everyone could see the material that came out of him that made him a captain.
“So he gets spoken about with a lot of positives—the leadership, being able to marshal, words that can take you to the next level.
“I’m not saying Vincent is not talented, because he is a wonderfully talented man.
But a lot of players who played higher up the field—wide players, forward players, and deep 10 positions—are not spoken about in that way.
“Compared to their white counterparts, they do not have the same reference. I often ponder why. It is frequently used as “the swift one” and “power and pace.” The negative stereotypes have been around for a long time.
However, according to Townsend, Kompany is “dispelling those falsehoods.”.