Rise of the Machines: Bayern Munich to use automatic free kick jumping wall to improve set plays

Thomas Muller, Robert Lewandowski, Sadio Mane. Bayern Munich have had a multitude of great players in recent years, but no great free kick takers. Bayern has really not scored that many goals from direct free kicks for several seasons. Now, it seems that the club are looking to help Joshua Kimmich, Leroy Sane and co. improve their free kick technique. This is because the club have just invested in a new automatic free kick jumping wall (Bild via @iMiaSanMia):

This new training technology deals with one of the fundamental problems of traditional mannequin walls — the lack of jumping. With this new free kick wall, Bayern’s set piece takers will be able to closer replicate the real life experience of taking a free kick. In fact, members of the wall jump at different heights, in order to mimic a real life wall:

Simply put, shooting from free kicks were an area that Bayern coaches and Julian Nagelsmann had to address given the apparent underperformance in this area for several seasons. Hopefully, this new wall improves the skill of our free kick takers and Bayern actually score one every so often!