BFW Postseason Break Down: Corentin Tolisso - Most Important Transfer Out

Welcome to the next edition of BFW’s Postseason awards! Today we’re looking at our winner of “Most Important Transfer Out”, Frenchman Corentin Tolisso.

Oh CoCo, how much hope I think we all at Bavarian Football Works had for you. Young, hungry, and talented coming off a rather spectacular couple of seasons being a regular at Lyon. That talent and consistency earned him a FC Bayern record €41.5 million transfer and we all expected him to be the next regular in a dominating midfield. However, if this season has done anything it has confirmed that I think it is time for CoCo to leave for greener pastures.

His first year with the Red in 2017 was nothing short of spectacular, ending the season as Bayern’s 3rd highest goal scorer with 10 goals and 6 assists, his career at Bayern has ended with a somewhat injury-prone Corentin Tolisso seeing only 13 appearances over the COVID-19 impacted 2019-2020 season after a different injury limited him to just 2 appearances the season prior. Now, some of you may chalk it up to a bit of bad luck and while that may be true, I see this as indicative of another problem: He’s simply lower on the pecking order and cannot keep healthy. And in my eyes, the health is the greatest concern. What good Is a player that cannot remain on the pitch?

So far during Corentin Tolisso’s time at Bayern, we’ve seen Joshua Kimmich move from being one of the worlds best right-backs to being one of the, if not THE best No. 6 in the world over the past 2 seasons. We’ve seen Thomas Müller coming out of the ashes of the Carlo Ancelotti and Niko Kovac regimes to shatter the Bundesliga assist record and be one of Hansi Flick’s most essential cogs in a utterly dominate FC Bayern side.. Leon Goreztka...or ahem..Leon Buffetzka has just been incredible this year as well. This is not to mention Thiago (all transfer rumors aside), Javi Martinez, Michaël Cuisance and new talented youngster Tanguy Nianzou all round up a relatively large midfield room.

Photo by Stefan Matzke - sampics/Corbis via Getty Images

Kimmich, Goretzka and Müller are automatic starters when fully healthy. Cuisance and Kouassi aren’t going anywhere as they’re still young and hugely talented (and recently signed). At worst, Javi and Thiago leave but even then that shouldn’t stop CoCo from leaving. He’s had two full seasons to establish himself, and at his current age of 25 (26 in a week), it’s hard to see him becoming the player we expected him to be when we signed him in 2017. While he proved, albeit inconsistently, in 2017 that he had the talent, his combination of injury woes and inability to establish himself over the following 2 years should be what we need to understand he’s not cut out for FC Bayern. The jarring thing is Corentin Tolisso comes on the heels of yet another bad miss of FC Bayern with young talented midfielders in Renato Sanches. I can speak for all of us when at BFW when I say we were excited to have Sanches and were excited about the future. But sadly, we all know how that played out.

At the end of the day, Corentin Tolisso is a very gifted footballer. But when FC Bayern has the every-day options of Müller, Kimmich, Goretzka combined with key rotational players such as Thiago and Javi Martinez, it’s easy to see how he simply fell down the depth chart. While I wish CoCo could’ve improved to the level of Kimmich or Goreztka, he simply has not. I personally believe it is in the best interest of both Corentin Tolisso and FC Bayern to sell him to a team in which he can have meaningful minutes and can play much like they did with Sanches who is enjoying a resurgent year at Lille. Hopefully this world cup winner can regain his form one day!