The sporting director is content to wait and observe how events play out over the next months.
Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting has enjoyed a bright two weeks for Bayern Munich, having scored 3 goals and tallied 2 assists from the wins over SC Freiburg in the Bundesliga and FC Augsburg in the DFB-Pokal. The first week of October, he had also opened his scoring account for the season with a goal in Bayern’s 5-0 win over Viktoria Plzen in the Champions League. With Leroy Sane’s injury absence, and Kingsley Coman’s recent red card suspension, Choupo-Moting has been a fantastic flex option for Julian Nagelsmann in attack, as he’s Bayern’s only active veteran striker — Mathys Tel is significantly less experienced.
He had missed the beginning of the season with a groin strain, so his underlying numbers, with the evidence we have from the last three weeks, could’ve potentially been even better by this point had he not been hurt. For what it’s worth, when he doesn’t trust Tel in certain situations, Nagelsmann has used a variety of Sadio Mane, Serge Gnabry, and even Thomas Muller as the most advanced attacker in any given Bayern lineup, but Choupo-Moting is the only natural striker in that crop of players other than Tel and his returns have been crucial.
Choupo-Moting’s current contract with Bayern is set to expire in June of 2023, but there is still a chance that the club could wind up signing him to an extension before that time comes. Sporting director Hasan Salihamidzic recently said that it’s an option the club is open to, but he didn’t want to delve into any more detail then that. “Let’s let Choupo play a bit now. He’s doing very well. We know what we have in him, and he knows what he has in us,” Brazzo told Abendzeitung’s Maximilian Koch.
Given the front office’s reluctance to say that the will definitely go for a striker in the winter transfer window, extending Choupo would make sense at the rate he’s able to produce attacking returns. In the run-up to the World Cup and just after the tournament in Qatar, there are also bound to be mounting injuries piling up, so by the time the January transfer window roles around, we might have a better look at how his overall stats are lining up.
Financially, it appears that extending Choupo for at least another season would be a far better choice than forking over the cash for a top-tier striker, but it depends on how things go. When Choupo’s current contract ends in the summer of 2019, there will still be a lot of interest in signing Harry Kane from Tottenham. Bayern has even allegedly considered lining up Marcus Thuram from Borussia Monchengladbach as a backup in case they can’t afford to sign Kane. Choupo’s future may be significantly impacted by the course of events involving Kane and Thuram.
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