Karl-Heinz Rummenigge says Leroy Sane is “more interesting” than Ivan Perisic

Ivan Perisic turned out to be a valuable loan pick-up for Bayern Munich last season en route to securing the treble, but the circumstances weren’t properly aligned to extend his stay in Bavaria.

Of course, Bayern wound up getting their star man in Leroy Sane from Manchester City this summer, but the two wingers are two entirely different players.

In the most recent edition of Bild (via Sempre Inter), Karl-Heinz Rummenigge described Sane as a “more interesting” player than Perisic. Of course, there were periods towards the end of last season where Bayern was toying with the idea of buying Perisic from Inter Milan on a permanent basis, but they wound up focusing their efforts on Sane, and also finding replacements for both Thiago Alcantara and Philippe Coutinho.

“We were hurt by Thiago Alcantara’s departure to Liverpool because he is a difficult player to replace, but Perisic and Philippe Coutinho were replaced well. As far as Perisic is concerned, we replaced him proudly with Sane, a more interesting player in the long term,” Rummenigge explained.

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Hindsight is always 20/20, but because of the knee injury Sane sustained in August of 2019, Bayern was ultimately able to get a bit of a price reduction from Manchester City when they finally signed him this past summer. Sane would have originally costed around €80 million, instead of the €50 million Bayern spent on him, but his ACL injury set things back quite a bit.

Bayern got Perisic on loan last summer for €4.5 million, so they certainly got their money’s worth from the veteran Croatian winger. They perhaps didn’t get the highest quality replacement for Coutinho in bringing back Douglas Costa on loan from Juventus, but all things considered, they were able to get Sane for a cheaper price than had been initially touted in the summer of 2019. While Perisic might have been a stable presence last season, Rummenigge, like the rest of Bayern’s front office, realizes that Sane is the long term solution in the wing position alongside Serge Gnabry and Kingsley Coman.

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