Reducing Wages and Investing in Youth: What's Going On at FC Bayern Munich?

Christian Nerlinger, in his first term as director of sport at Bayern Munich, has been talking about loads of changes which are about to take place at Bayern. He almost seems to be Uli Hoeness' brother.

He has been talking about the wages at the club. Due to the current economic situation, Bayern has decided that players cannot just walk away with bags of cash and not be affected by the economic problems because they are part of a debt-free, rich club. He has—to be precise—been talking about wage reduction.

What interests me more than this topic, is that of investing in youth. Bayern has, in recent years, been involved in buying plenty of players from either other German clubs or overseas. Currently, their starting lineup consists of only four homegrown players.

Since Louis Van Gaal came to the club, he has relied heavily on two youngsters: Thomas Muller and Holger Badstuber. Their performances are rarely poor, and even when they are, they can be looked at as average performances.

Also, since Bayern wants to reduce their wage bills, they cannot continuously buy players, as these players, in most cases, tend to have higher wages than their homegrown counterparts.

Bayern offloaded three players for six months on loan deals and one permanently. They took three youngsters to their training camp from their youth academy. David Alaba, one of the trio, is only 17, while Mehmet Ekici and Diego Contento are both 19.

This takes us back to a few players previously produced in the academy.

Zvejdan Misimovic, Piotr Trochowski and Mats Hummels are all household names in the Bundesliga and just a few of the youth academy players that Bayern let go of. Thus, Louis Van Gaal is doing what very few coaches did.

He is promoting the youngsters and trying to develop a "homegrown" approach to the game.

All these three players are undoubtedly talented. It would be excellent for any supporter to see two youngsters from the youth team coming and joining up with Muller, Badstuber, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Philipp Lahm, and possibly Toni Kroos.