Despite Long Line, Butt Remains on Throne

By: Luke | January 20th, 2010

It seems these days, that everyone has got their candidate for who should be FC Bayern Munich’s next goalkeeper. There’s no question management was interested in Manuel Neuer. Rene Adler gets mentioned in the next breath by many fans. Since Bayern will be visiting Bremen this weekend, you’ll see the mention of Tim Wiese here and there. Oliver Kahn would apparently like to see all that Audi money go into bringing Gianluigi Buffon to Munich. The list goes on and on. Steve Mandanda, Igor Akinfeev, Thomas Sorenson, and (perhaps more realistically) Samir Handanovic have all been linked with varying degrees of believability.

Publicly, Bayern’s leadership is not persuaded that Butt is merely a stopgap placeholder for the next German superstar keeper. When asked recently, Nerlinger was quoted on the club’s official site as saying “If we go into the next season with Jörg Butt as the keeper, I have no problem with that.”

You wouldn’t hear a lot of fan and media support for that position. So where is the disconnect? Why are the media and a large segment of fans just not sold on Butt keeping his job for the next 2-3 seasons?

butt 2 rodney_dangerfield
Butt: With a new transfer suggestions each day, is it a question of respect?

The stats are deceiving; Bayern have just 5 clean sheets on the season versus 10 for league leader Köln and 9 for Leverkusen. And yet, Bayern and Leverkusen have allowed the same number of goals, (15) and Koln has allowed 18.

Perhaps it’s Butt’s adventurism. There is no question that he has kept the team in matches against opponents great and small. But pretty much every week, you’re guaranteed to see him coming out a little too far, inducing a cringe every time, but never yet paying a price for it.

Maybe it’s long memories. After all, it was Butt’s total blundering in the preseason Audi Cup that cemented Michael Rensing in the starting role at the start of the season (Rensing was named the best player of the “tournament”–how unbelievable does that seem now?). There may be something to be said for a keeper gaining his position through strong play, rather than the weak play of the man in front of him. It would be hard for anyone to say that Butt played his way back into the lineup, there simply wasn’t any alternative but to put him back in at the time. But Butt had played for keeps, that is for sure.

Whenever the time comes for Bayern to start a new star goalkeeper, one thing seems certain: he won’t have come from Bayern’s youth system. It seems a strange imbalance; Bayern’s system has produced a wealth of talent at every other position. But for as long as anyone can remember, the youth system hasn’t produced a keeper that could stick for the club. Oliver Kahn already had years of Bundesliga experience when he came from Karlsruhe; Raimond Aumann mainly developed in FC Augsburg’s ranks, whose youth team regularly outshined the senior side until recently. Even Sepp Maier had to give up playing midfield and come from across town into the ranks. A week ago in Basel, two of Bayern’s more recent young keepers were in attendance: Michael Rensing sat rotting on the bench, and Stefan Wessels was allowing silly goals like Klose’s first Interestingly, both came to Bayern from TuS Lingen, which should probably removed as a feeder team for keepers at this point.

UPDATE
On Thursday, Butt’s thoughts on the speculation over his future were featured in interviews with the club’s official website and other published reports. Nice of them to finish my story for me a day later!

More one liners

Bayern and Wolfsburg have pledged that they will play a friendly match “sometime in the next six months” to benefit the victims of the Haitian earthquake disaster. Look for greater cooperation between the two clubs in matters like this as the Audi-Volkswagen relationship translates over.

Ivica Olic was named Croatian Footballer of the Year, so čestitam! to Ivica.

Köln is rumored to be interested in Mehmet Ekici. To me, now doesn’t seem to be the right time to send him off, even if he does get very limited time with the first team. I just have the feeling that if he does get sent out on loan, he’ll be one of those guys that never comes back.

ESPN has not confirmed Saturday’s match schedule, but you can pretty much bet on Bremen-Bayern showing on ESPN 360 and ESPN Deportes in the US.

Don’t forget to follow the Bayern Offside on Twitter