Can Ünal Leaves Bayern for Hanover: The Coaches Without a Stand

Last Monday, Hannover 96 issued a brief statement: Can Ünal will become Sandro Wagner's assistant coach. The job starts with immediate effect. No grand press conference, no unveiling in front of tens of thousands of fans. Just a name moving from Munich to Hanover, and a vacancy being filled at Bayern.

For most fans, this is a line of news that can be scrolled past in three seconds. But for me, it is the kind of news I like to read most slowly. Because during the transfer window, when everything revolves around multi-million deals and expensive names, the real story sometimes lies with the coaches — the ones who never have their names sung in the stands, yet who lay the foundations for everything.

A small earthquake in Lower Saxony

To understand why a story about an assistant coach is worth pausing for, it must be placed in its proper context. Hanover 96 — the club from Lower Saxony — had just been through a turbulent period. Christian Titz was dismissed after only five games. That number, five, is so short it was barely enough for a coach to leave any imprint on anything. In modern football, five games is a stretch of time in which a coach is judged before his players even have time to remember his name.

Sandro Wagner was appointed as his replacement. And the first thing Wagner did was rebuild his own backbone. He did not wait, did not experiment across a season. He brought in Can Ünal — who, by his own words, had been his number one preferred candidate for the role. This is where I want you to pause: a newly appointed head coach, standing under the pressure of a club that had just sacked his predecessor after five games, spent his first days choosing an assistant he had been pursuing for months.

Wagner said: "Can is a young, very talented and ambitious coach who works very meticulously. Anyone who knows him also particularly praises his human qualities." He went on to say the two had been in frequent contact over the past few months, and it became clear that they wanted to work together.

Reading this, I am reminded of something I have always believed: building a coaching staff is exactly like building a squad — what matters is not the biggest names, but the people who fit together best. Wagner was not looking for an assistant to fill a gap. He was looking for someone he had already pictured in his mind long ago, someone he knew would understand his philosophy without lengthy explanation. That is why he used the phrase "preferred candidate" — a phrase usually reserved for player signings.

Can Ünal's career before this was tied to Bayern Munich — not the first team, but the academy. He worked as the Under-16 coach of Germany's "record champions." It is a job the naked eye does not see. No cameras, no press, no stands. Only fifteen- and sixteen-year-old children, repeated training sessions, and a teacher quietly shaping every run, every touch.

To complete Wagner's staff, there are also Levent Sürme and Clemens Döring. Three names, one framework. People only mention the head coach when the team wins, and only mention players when a goal is scored. As for these three, they will walk into the season without anyone calling their names. We never touch the ball, but the ball always touches us — and for coaches, the reverse is true: they touch the ball every day, but the ball rarely remembers them.

The machine that produces coaches

The most interesting part of this story is not on Hanover's side, but on Bayern's — where the vacancy was filled in an instant. The moment Ünal left, Bayern responded by promoting Maximilian Welzmüller, Ünal's former assistant, to head coach.

Bernhard Seonbuchner — head of player/coach development and transition at Bayern Munich — said: "At the Campus, we want to continuously develop not only our talents but also our coaches." He called Ünal's opportunity to work under Wagner in professional football "recognition for our academy."

And then he added a sentence I consider the manifesto of the whole story: Bayern are "consistently continuing along the path of promoting and supporting our coaching talents" by elevating Welzmüller.

Let me breathe some soul into the numbers here, because this is exactly where most reports miss the point. The story is not that a coach left. The story is that an academy can produce and replace coaches the way other clubs replace players. It is an entirely different mechanism. In most places around the world, when an academy coach leaves, someone new must be hired from outside, must start over, must spend months understanding the philosophy. At Bayern, the small miracle lies in the fact that this process is never interrupted.

Welzmüller has a trajectory worth telling slowly. He played for Bayern Munich's reserves from 2026 to 2026, before ending his playing career at SpVgg Unterhaching two years later. After hanging up his boots, he did not leave football. He stayed at Bayern as a youth scout, then moved into coaching in 2026. Today, just one year after beginning his managerial path, he has been handed the head coach position at the academy.

Look at that timeline and feel its rhythm: reserve player — retirement — scout — coach — head coach. Each step is a transformation, and each transformation was tracked, recognized and promoted by Bayern. This is not luck. This is a system.

And there is one small detail I cannot help but pause on: Maximilian's brother, Dr Josef Welzmüller, is currently the sporting director of SV Elversberg, having succeeded Ole Book in that role. One family, two men, two football executive roles at two different clubs. I have always found details like this worth writing down, because they remind us that football is not only about isolated individuals. It is a web of people, families and relationships cultivated over many years that the stands never see.

The number 72 and what we really count

I have said before that I learned to use the numbers of exhaustion to tell human stories, rather than list match statistics. In this story, there are a few numbers I want you to keep.

The first: five. Five games was all Christian Titz had at Hanover before he was dismissed. Five games — in modern football — is so short that people do not even have time to write his name correctly in the report. For me, this is the silent tragedy of the coaching profession: a coach is never judged by what he builds, but by what he manages to show in a period that the board decides is "enough."

The second: two. Can Ünal had been at Bayern, tied to the academy, and now moves to Hanover only after two men — Wagner and Ünal — had been in contact for "many months" to agree on the job. Two people, a conversation stretching over months, and a decision that from the outside looks instantaneous.

The third, and perhaps the number I most want you to remember: one year. Just one year since Welzmüller moved into coaching in 2026, and today he is head coach at Bayern's academy. One year. Imagine being a young coach, just entering the profession, and only twelve months later you are trusted with one of the most important coaching roles at one of Europe's best academies. That is not the number of promotion. That is the number of trust given at the right moment.

I always think numbers know how to grieve, know how to keep their word, know how to expose truths the eye overlooks. Titz's number five tells of the cruelty of the managerial profession. Wagner and Ünal's many months tell of the patience of belief. Welzmüller's one year tells of the speed at which a system can lift its own people — if it truly believes in training coaches, not just players.

A counterintuitive view: Coaches also need to be transferred

Now comes the part where I want you to challenge yourself. We are used to the notion that players are bought, sold, loaned, rise in value, fall in value. But we rarely think of coaches — especially academy coaches — that way. And this is exactly the blind spot I want to drag into the light: in modern football, academy coaches have become a form of asset that can be valued, transferred and replaced — just like a promising young player.

Look at how Bayern handled Ünal's departure. They did not see it as a loss. They saw it as an achievement. Seonbuchner said outright: Ünal being given an opportunity in professional football is "recognition for our academy." Let that settle. When a coach of yours is invited by another club, you are not losing a person — you have produced a product good enough that others want to buy it. The same logic Bayern applies to players, they apply to coaches.

And here is the most counterintuitive part: most of us think a great academy is one that produces great players. But looking at this story, another standard emerges — a truly great academy is one that can produce great coaches too, and can even replace them with someone else trained within the same system when they leave.

This stands in complete contrast to how most clubs, including many big ones, operate. They build an academy coaching staff from scattered individuals, each from a different place, each carrying a different philosophy. When one leaves, a part of the academy's memory leaves with them. At Bayern, when Ünal leaves, the memory stays — because Welzmüller had been inside it for a long time, had watched, had absorbed, and was ready to take over.

I am not naive enough to think this is a flawless system. No system is. But I believe this small story reveals something large about how elite football operates at its deepest layer — the layer the stands never see, but which determines everything. And it also reminds me of a line I keep in my notebook: every contract is a promise, every promise is a sorrow waiting to happen. For Ünal, the promise came true. For Titz, the sorrow arrived after five games. For Welzmüller, both are still waiting ahead.

The forgotten silences between the big moments

Over many years of following German football, I have learned that the truth of the pitch never lies in what is loudest. It lies in the silences — in the people outside the frame, in the names the commentator never reads out, in the jobs without which the entire machine would stop but which no one knows why.

Academy coaching is one of those silences. Can Ünal spent his years at Bayern teaching fifteen-year-olds how to move without the ball, how to read space before it forms, how to stay calm in a match no one records. And now he moves to Hanover to do similar work at another level, with another teacher, in a context where the final result will be recorded — but still from the bench, still without any stand applauding for him alone.

I remember once sitting alone in an empty stand on a rainy afternoon, watching a match with no spectators because of a pandemic. The pitch then had no cheering, only the sound of boots on the ball and coaches shouting into the void. And I understood that the coaches on the bench then were doing a job that, even when the world stopped, they continued. The heart keeps beating, even when the stands no longer applaud. The stories of Ünal, Welzmüller, and Titz too, are all such hearts.

There is one thing I always ask myself when reading a coaching transfer story: does anyone ever say thank you to the coaches who stayed? Wagner thanked Ünal by bringing him to Hanover. Bayern thanked Ünal by calling his departure "recognition for the academy." Welzmüller thanked Bayern by saying he was grateful the club trusted him. Three thank-yous, three different directions, but one rhythm. And perhaps that is exactly what makes a truly sustainable system: it knows how to thank those who leave without forgetting those who stay.

What I carry away from this story

I do not intend to end with a summary. Summaries are for scoreboards, not stories. Instead, I want to leave an open question.

If an academy were judged not only by the players it produces, but also by the coaches it nurtures and is ready to let go — then perhaps the measure of success in European football needs to be rewritten. Not by trophies, but by the people trained to continue their work wherever they go.

Can Ünal will begin standing beside Sandro Wagner at Hanover. He will never have his name sung in the stands. But if the children he once taught at the Campus one day step onto the big pitch, they will carry a part of him with them — and that part will never be recorded in any statistic.

The pitch never lies, it is only that we are not slow enough to hear it.