Bayern Munich asked and Eintracht Frankfurt said no without discussing a figure. It is the least ambiguous answer in football and the one clubs most often come back to test.
Add another name to the list: RB Leipzig have asked the question everybody in the game has been asking about Raphaël Guerreiro. The answer from Bayern Munich has not changed — yet.
Boardroom24 Aug 2026
The ground is getting bigger
The plans are signed off at a capacity of 104529. Decisions like this are judged twenty years later, by people who were not in the room when they were taken.
“Some decisions take a long time. This one took ten minutes, and most of that was finding a pen.” Marcel Hofmann and Bayern Munich agree another 3 years.
He trains hard, says the right things and goes home to an empty flat. Nobody at Bayern Munich has done anything wrong, which is exactly what makes it so difficult to fix.
“We keep meeting, and we keep leaving the room with the same numbers we walked in with.” Another round of talks at Bayern Munich, another week without a signature from Ralph Schmidt.
$95.7M was the most the club would pay and Paris Saint-Germain were asking for more. Deals like this are revived in the last week of a window roughly half the time, and everybody involved knows it.
This is not cover and nobody is pretending it is. $41.9M has been paid because Andriy Lunin is straightforwardly better than what was already here, and the club has decided to stop waiting.
Bayern Munich asked and Napoli said no without discussing a figure. It is the least ambiguous answer in football and the one clubs most often come back to test.
The offer went to Kashima Antlers this week and it is theirs to answer. First bids are rarely meant to succeed; they are meant to find out how loud the door closes.
Every footballer has an answer to the question about his boyhood club, and most of them never get to act on it. Andriy Lunin has, at Bayern Munich, and the first month will show what that does to a man.
The number the board signed off was not enough. It has been asked again and raised its own offer to $169.2M — a club that wants Vitinha enough to be asked twice.
The offer went to TSG Hoffenheim this week and it is theirs to answer. First bids are rarely meant to succeed; they are meant to find out how loud the door closes.
Bayern Munich asked and Bayer Leverkusen said no without discussing a figure. It is the least ambiguous answer in football and the one clubs most often come back to test.
“I have ambitions, and I would like the club to share them.” Nobody has asked to leave and nobody has been shown the door — but a player chooses that sentence carefully, and a boardroom hears it exactly as it was meant.
The academy exists for exactly this morning. Marcel Hofmann has come through every age group the club runs and has now been handed a senior number, and the people who coached him at twelve will be the proudest in the building.
Clubs spend fortunes looking for players and occasionally find one down the corridor. Dominik Kraus is that, and the reception he gets on his first appearance will be different in kind from the one any signing receives.