American wunderkind Julian Green looks even closer to a stay in Bayern Munich this season, according to an interview with chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge conducted by Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl.
Rummenigge says Bayern has turned down multiple loan offers from Premier League clubs this offseason, adding that they were “not bad clubs.”
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The German champions simply favor the 19-year-old American, who made a splash by scoring moments into his World Cup debut to give the USMNT brief hope late in their Round of 16 loss to Belgium.
“He’s something special and very young,” said Rummenigge of Green ahead of Bayern’s arrival in New York City on Wednesday for friendlies against Chivas de Guadalajara (in Harrison, N.J., on Thursday) and the MLS All-Stars (in Portland, Ore., on Aug. 6). “On our team he’s the backup of players like [Arjen] Robben and [Franck] Ribéry, world-class players, so it’s not easy to take their place in the first 11 of our team.”
Rummenigge wouldn’t specify which Premier League teams made offers for Green (“not bad clubs, I can tell you”), but he sounded optimistic about Green’s future.
“He came up from our youth department, had a big opportunity in the World Cup and scored a fantastic goal vs. Belgium,” Rummenigge said. “With a bit of luck he can do well [at Bayern].”
Bayern is Stateside for the aforementioned friendlies in the hopes of trumping up their new American office, as the Bundesliga giants look to step up its branding on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
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Playing time is hard to come by at Bayern, and a loan move would not be a bad thing for Green. Still, he’s an injury away from playing significant time on one of the biggest teams in the world. Staying with Bayern’s first team at age 19 is not a bad thing for neither player, club nor country.
