In the football podcast “He can kick”, which Die Zeit unfortunately discontinued in January of this year, one of the best players in the world was evaluated episode after episode using four categories: talent, performance, balance and, which leads to FC Bayern Munich and the footballer of the week, autonomy.
This was intended to show how dependent a player is on external circumstances. From his coach, from his team, but also from the wind and weather. To check this, you can use the question that the former football player Andy Gray once so wonderfully formulated as an expert on an English television station: But can he do it on a cold, wet Wednesday night in Stoke?
Yes, Luis Díaz, 29 years old, has already shown as a Liverpool FC player that he can do it on a cold, wet Wednesday evening in Stoke. (Even if his Stoke was no longer called Stoke due to Stoke City’s relegation from the English first division.)
Díaz makes the difference
That’s one reason why FC Bayern signed him last summer and is said to have spent at least 67.5 million euros on the transfer fee alone. The other reasons became visible this week with every dribble and every goal. And anyone who has watched the entire show can come to two conclusions before the most important weeks of the season:
Firstly, that Díaz, a winger from Colombia, is not the best player in the best German football team, but is the most autonomous player. And secondly, that FC Bayern has been able to win less than it wanted to in recent seasons because it had too few autonomous players.
This week Díaz gave the strongest proof of his independence to date at the stadium in Munich. It started on Sunday evening when he took two penalties and scored three goals in the difficult Bundesliga game against TSG Hoffenheim (5-1) – please don’t let the final result fool you. This continued on Wednesday evening,
when he scored another goal in the difficult cup game against RB Leipzig (2-0) (the other was scored by Harry Kane from a penalty). He made the difference.
The positive realization for FC Bayern should be that the team was not always in flow against both Hoffenheim and Leipzig – and still won these difficult games because there is a striker who doesn’t seem to rely so much on the flow of the others.
This season, Díaz has already collected 19 goals and 14 assists in 31 games. And the only reason he played 31 and not 34 of 34 games was because he was suspended for one game in the Bundesliga and suspended for two games in the Champions League. In Munich, coach Vincent Kompany will never say about Luis Díaz what coach Louis van Gaal said there about Thomas Müller. But Kompany doesn’t have to say that Diaz always plays, because something else is more important anyway: that it looks like he can always play.
The pseudo-independence of the predecessors
This is what sets Díaz apart from his predecessors. On good days, Kingsley Coman and Leroy Sané could also make the difference as wingers. But because their good days coincided conspicuously with the good days of others, they were constantly suspected of false independence. You could also say that you couldn’t rely on them on a cold, wet evening in Stoke.
Compared to Coman and Sané, Díaz is significantly more autonomous. He is not only more independent of the coach, team, wind and weather, but also “independent of the result”. That’s what Joshua Kimmich said when he answered the questions in the interview zone of the stadium on Wednesday evening. What are Díaz’s strengths? “An extremely energetic player,” said Kimmich, someone who doesn’t care whether his team is leading 3-0 or trailing 2-0, because: “He always gives his all, he’s always up for football, he always has energy, he wants to get involved in every duel, he’s never too good for a run.” And because these Díaz characteristics are also Kimmich characteristics, he said with a smile on his face: “I really have the feeling that he’s happy to be able to play football every three days. That’s really cool.”
Where Kimmich was beaming, there was already Max Eberl, FC Bayern’s sports director and therefore the man who was responsible for Díaz’s signing. And because the commitment had been critically commented on, he was asked whether this week gave him satisfaction. “No satisfaction,” said Eberl. “We brought in a good player. We knew what we were doing, even if there was some criticism at the beginning. We were convinced that he was a player who would suit us very, very well. Not just with his goals, not just with his assists. But with his willingness, with his intensity. He showed that in Liverpool for years.”
So he came to the interim conclusion, which sounded a little bit like satisfaction: “Simply a good transfer.” And as an interim remark: “If some people now have to row back and say, ‘Okay, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all’, then that’s okay.”
Díaz’s commitment was also critically commented on in the FAZ. However, there was no doubt that he was a very good player, only how long he would be a very good player. The argument: Anyone who invests a large part of their budget in a player of Díaz’s age is putting a bit of pressure on themselves because the window in which you can win with a player in their late 20s is significantly smaller than with a player in their early 20s. The validity of this argument has not changed. But in top-class sport, the following generally applies: whoever wins is right. And FC Bayern, with Luis Díaz and this team, is in the semi-finals of the DFB Cup for the first time since 2020.
date: 2026-02-12 22:27:00