Manuel Neuer: calm in the storm

The captain is staying on board! Manuel Neuer has extended his contract at FC Bayern until 2025 – exactly a month after making his comeback from an almost year-long absence. The 37-year-old had to wait 350 days, but Bayern's number one is finally back in goal for the final stretch of the year. Giving up never crossed Neuer's mind: "I love being a footballer too much for that." Club magazine 51 looks back – and forward – with him. 2024 offers big aims again!

The message is powerful, bursting above all with unbridled strength and communicates loudly: resistance is futile! "I'm a rolling thunder, pouring rain / I'm coming on like a hurricane / My lightning's flashing across the sky!" So begins the hit "Hells Bells" by rock band AC/DC. The lyrics begin with the sound of a bell and are layered over wild guitar riffs. It's hard to believe that this musical lightning storm was once recorded in the rather peaceful Bahamas – but on the other hand, you also rub your eyes at the composure with which Manuel Neuer plucks out one cross after another, contrary to the crazy rhythm. The crescendo around the goalkeeper echoes deafeningly through the Allianz Arena, but he is simply doing his job. Manuel Neuer, 37, is back in goal for FC Bayern.

It's Saturday 28 October, with just over half an hour to go until kick-off against Darmstadt – a historic day. Neuer is already on the pitch with his goalkeeping colleagues to warm up. For 11 months he has had to take on the role of spectator, today he is back in the Bayern box for the first time in a competitive match. As stadium announcer Stephan Lehmann explains, he has requested AC/DC to get him going – the song that sets the mood in many stadiums and to which Vitali Klitschko used to enter before his heavyweight boxing world championship fights. AC/DC is named after the imprint on a sewing machine, the initials stand for alternating current and direct current. Applied to Neuer and the atmosphere in a football arena: this man stays cool even when charged up.

At 14:49, Neuer had taken his first steps back into the limelight: out of the dressing room, up the steps and over the ramp onto the turf of the Allianz Arena, a route he has been very familiar with since his move to Munich in 2011, which he was painfully unable to take for such a long time after his injury last December. "Here we go – football is our life," thunders meaningfully over the loudspeakers at that moment, Neuer cheerfully curls over a few balls lying on the pitch before waving briefly but buoyantly into the block at the end. "He's back," Lehmann blares into the microphone amid applause – also for Sven Ulreich, who has stood in for the number one so excellently for months and returns to the bench without complaint on this day.

What is going on inside a competitive athlete, who has already won everything there is to win, in what is unquestionably one of the most special situations of his career? Hell's bells are ringing around Neuer, but his face is an impenetrable mask: pure concentration. Eleven months lie behind him, which FC Bayern's doctors say took a special kind of willpower to get through.

WhatsApp to teammates

Jochen Hahne remembers exactly how the screen on his phone lit up with a call from Manuel Neuer on December 9. It was a Friday, the FC Bayern team doctor was sitting in the car, and the doctor read between the lines from the goalkeeper's report that something bigger had happened. Neuer was injured on the ski slope at Roßkopf, his local mountain at Tegernsee. Hahne urgently advised him not to ski down into the valley on his own; he is taken by helicopter to the clinic in Murnau. "First aid plays an immense role," explains Peter Ueblacker, FCB team doctor with Hahne. Looking back, Neuer says that he was optimistic the whole time and played down the pain. But when his ski boot was removed in Murnau, the extent of the problem became clear. His entire lower leg was broken, tibia and fibula. "It's the most serious injury we've seen here in professional football for decades," says Ueblacker.

Neuer worked through it all thoroughly before his comeback; he went through his ordeal step by step as part of a documentary by the FC Bayern club media. He sits alone in front of the camera in the studio below Säbener Straße, which is the size of a medium-sized gym and was sparsely lit for this production. You get a sense of how lonely competitive athletes can feel in rehab, how lonely it can be in goal – and how strongly this man defies it all. Immediately after the incident, he sent a WhatsApp to the team chat and apologised, he says: "I was sorry for the team and the whole club. A lot happened during the season, and I couldn't be there. When you're injured as an athlete, you're powerless."

Just moments until kick-off against Darmstadt. On the last few meters back to his natural habitat, the penalty area, Neuer puts his heads together with Matthijs de Ligt, then Joshua Kimmich runs back to him to give him one last high-five. Arriving at the goal, Neuer touches both posts and the crossbar, a pre-match ritual. At the kick-off, he stands at the very edge of his penalty area, back in the game, no closer to the action. The first ball rolls straight back to him from the centre circle and his first official act is a long pass to Harry Kane. Just a few weeks ago, he felt a pain in his calf "like a knife thrust" when he tried to kick the ball just three or five meters.

Rehabilitation and the stages of capacity can never be planned from day one, explains Ueblacker in the documentary. Due to the pain in his calf, he and his surgeons decided to have another minor operation in August to remove metal. Neuer calls this "a small restart" and says that full trust in the doctors was characteristic at all times. Basically, there are different phases of healing, explains Ueblacker. First you look at the bone, it's about relieving pressure. Phase two means being able to walk again – Neuer was carefully observed by fitness trainer Thomas Wilhelmi and physio Knut Stamer as he took his first steps on the treadmill. Phase three involves working on the muscles before learning how to walk in phase four – including on an anti-gravity treadmill to slowly increase the weight being placed on the body. "I wanted to take every step," says Neuer, "and you can't come back without confidence."

You also have to be able to rely on each other on the pitch. Bastian Schweinsteiger once said that Manuel Neuer was the most important teammate in his entire career because with him in goal, you always have more security in your own game. Against Darmstadt, the number one was called upon once in a dangerous one-v-one situation in the first half, with the score still at 0-0. The comeback game could hardly have got off to a more turbulent start: Kimmich is sent off after just a few minutes with a straight red card, coach Thomas Tuchel immediately calls Neuer to the bench for a consultation and instructions are given on a piece of paper. At times, Neuer stands on the halfway line for his own corners. An overseer with an eye on the big picture., it was always his motivation "to finally see my players in front of me in the game again," he says. "Giving up was never an option. I just love being a footballer."

Grinning through blades of grass

There are videos of one of his first sessions after the injury outside on the training pitch at Säbener Straße, at the beginning of May. It's a grey day, it's raining, goalkeeping coach Michael Rechner hits balls at the goal and praises every save: the patient is obviously in shape. When Neuer goes for a shower, his hair is sticking to his head in wet strands, his face adorned with blades of grass – and a broad, happy grin. "Some people might have said with an injury like that: I'm a certain age, I've already achieved a lot and I'm happy with my career," says the 37-year-old. "And of course I am happy with my career, but I know there are still great things to come. That's the standard I set myself." Tuchel says of his goalkeeper: "I admire him. Manuel was so clear from day one that he was pursuing his goal and he stuck to it." Neuer trained with the team again for the first time on September 28, and gave the first command even before the start of the training session: please water the pitch in front of the goal again. Kimmich's comment: "Are you back on the pitch? Finally, finally, finally!"

In the second half, Bayern pick up the pace against a decimated Darmstadt, who had two players sent, and score a whopping eight goals within 38 minutes. Neuer punches the air at every goal, jumps in the air in celebration, high-fives his colleagues warming up next to his goal. He hugs Thomas Müller, goes chest to chest with Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting, and shakes hands with Bouna Sarr and the young Mathys Tel and Aleks Pavlović. After every Munich goal, Neuer also has a ball thrown to him, which he bounces a few times and then loops back. These are his only notable touches of the ball in the second half, but he enjoys them too; an expression of real concentration.

After last December's botched World Cup, a lot of pressure was put on the Germany players – especially on the leaders, Neuer said, looking back from his chair, alone in the darkness of the TV studio. He himself had not planned to be back in Germany so early, he had only booked his vacation later. And so he tried to process things ("I had negative vibes in my head") by going hiking, jogging and eventually going on a ski tour with a few experienced people. He's been on skis since he was six, and for him the trip was actually as routine as picking up bread rolls – "but then I got stuck up there". Well, you can't quite put it like that. Neuer certainly didn't get stuck up there on the Roßkopf: he's back again.

At some point, he was able to juggle an orange softball in the gym, then there were his first sessions with mini balls, and at some point, behind closed doors indoors, he was jumping so powerfully on soft floor mats that Jamal Musiala applauded as he watched: "You're ready, you'll be back soon!" He had a great team around him, Neuer says gratefully, and Hahne also fondly remembers one story from the sidelines. Right at the beginning, the doctor always came to the patient's home in Tegernsee to change the bandages and talk about everything. During the Christmas holidays, Neuer told Hahne to bring his family with him because of all the circumstances and there was Kaiserschmarrn for everyone. "That shows that Manu always has an eye for others. He actually had other things on his mind at the time," says the team doctor.

After the final whistle against Darmstadt, Neuer first takes time for a chat with his opposite number Marcel Schuhen in the centre circle, before embracing Kane, Müller, referee Martin Petersen and then Ulreich. He takes off his gloves and they lie on the pitch in no man's land between the box and the halfway line for a few minutes while the team celebrates the thumping victory in front of the South Stand. "Super Bayern, super Bayern," chants the red and white crowd. Neuer is encircled by Minjae Kim and de Ligt as the players bounce in time to the fans' chants. The message is at least as catchy as AC/DC – and resistance to FC Bayern is futile anyway. Especially when Manuel Neuer is involved.

📺 You can follow Neuer's comeback journey in our documentary: