Kompany's Bayern make case for defence

Racking up seven successive clean sheets across all competitions since a 4-1 blip at Barcelona in the UEFA Champions League proves that Kompany's men were keen to learn from a stinging experience in the Catalan capital.

Sure enough, the Bavarians subsequently got down to business at the training ground and ironed out some creases that resulted in shutouts against Bochum, Mainz, Union Berlin, Benfica, St. Pauli, Augsburg and now also Paris Saint-Germain.

That run of seven straight wins, no goals conceded is the team's best spell since the start of the 2011/12 season under Jupp Heynckes when they kept 10 straight shutouts in all competitions.

“It’s not like it’s just the back four working for it, but the whole team works off the ball," Joshua Kimmich recently explained, in quotes appearing on Bayern's official website. "At the end of the day, that brings us clean sheets but also dominance with the ball. You can see everyone’s working together, that everyone’s hungry to defend our goal."

The stats back up the 29-year-old's words. Bayern broke new ground by only allowing 49 shots on their goal in the first nine games this Bundesliga season, the lowest total of any team since data began being recorded back in 1993/94. They then limited St. Pauli to just three shots - and none on target - in front of their passionate fans, while Augsburg were limited to just two shots on Matchday 11 - in stark contrast to Bayern's total of 32.

"There was some criticism of our style of play," said Thomas Müller in reference to the reaction to Bayern's previous defensive fallibility. "But I think, on the whole, everyone who's watched us a bit can see that it's very effective what we're doing, especially off the ball." 

Watch: Bayern made it six clean sheets in a row when beating Augsburg on Matchday 11

“We never said that we don’t learn from mistakes that happened or from the games we’ve played," board member for sport Max Eberl added on fcbayern.com. "Obviously we look at it all; [the coach] and his backroom staff do so very intensively.

"You can see we have confidence in what we do. We're defending well, allowing opponents very little," he also stated after the 1-0 win over PSG in the Champions League.

That studious approach has seen Bayern decrease the amount of big chances afforded to opposition teams from eight across the first six matchdays to just one in the five games from matchdays 7 to 11. The side's xGoals concession rate has also dropped from 5.2 (0.87 per game) to just 1.39 (0.28 per game) over the same period.

Perhaps even more notable, though, is the fact that the Bavarians haven't allowed opponents a single shot on goal as a result of a counter over those five games, compared to the three goals they conceded on the break (from seven such attempts) in the first six matches - only bottom side Bochum let in more.

Much has been made of Bayern's goalscoring exploits this term, and for good reason with a full 36 strikes from their opening 11 matches. Yet as much credit as the team's forwards deserve, the defenders, too, have rightly come in for praise as their confidence and understanding of the coach's instructions grow and their respective performances continue to improve. To flourish up front, Bayern need solidity at the back, and they have worked on a previous susceptibility to counter-attacks while looking to form a tighter unit all the while. 

Watch: Manuel Neuer outlines Kompany's approach at the start of the season

Dayot Upamecano and Minjae Kim have been ever-present in Kompany's central-defensive set-up in the Bundesliga this season, and although both took a little time to find their feet together in 2024/25, things are working out better for the pair as each game passes.

“It's quite something that they're defending with such a huge space behind them," Kimmich explained. "Obviously we always try to support them, but it really helps us that both have great speed, that both are very strong in challenges. Both are making really clever decisions in their duels with opponents, and that really helps us with confidence."

In Kompany's tighter approach, the average distance between players dropped to 21.5 metres over Bundesliga matchdays 8 and 9 from 22.4 metres in the first six.

After the 1-0 victory over Benfica, Upamecano said, "Everyone wants to keep a clean sheet together, everyone wants to win together. This is how we have to keep going." The France international won six out of 10 tackles during the victory against the Portuguese side and boasted a 97 percent successful pass rate. Kim fared even better, with a 100 percent pass rate and winning 78 percent of his duels.

“I’ve always seen him as a monster in challenges but he’s also made progress with the ball at his feet," Kimmich said of the Korean. "You can see that he understands the coach’s ideas and wants to implement them.”

St. Pauli's Millerntor has generally been a happy hunting ground for Bayern in the past, and the Bavarians succeeded in making it four consecutive Bundesliga games without concession for the first time since 2018, a feat neither Hansi Flick, Julian Nagelsmann nor Thomas Tuchel managed before Kompany's arrival at the helm. 

They then went one better with another clean sheet in their home win against Augsburg, making it five consecutive Bundesliga clean sheets for the first time since the Carlo Ancelotti days of 2017.

They last managed six under Pep Guardiola in 2014. Could they now do that in Der Klassiker away at Borussia Dortmund? With a free-scoring attack and a defence growing in confidence, Kompany's Bayern are certainly a force to be reckoned with.