Bayern Munich's 10 youngest debutants: Kroos, Alaba et al
Alphonso Davies, Mats Hummels, Toni Kroos, David Alaba, Bastian Schweinsteiger…all Bayern Munich teenage debutants, but none were as young as Jamal Musiala when he made his Bundesliga debut for the 2019/20 champions on Matchday 33.
Davies was 18 years and 86 days old when he made his Bayern bow in late-January 2019. Pretty precocious of the Canadian prodigy, but he does not even rank in the top 10 youngest players to pull on the famed Bayern shirt for a league game.
In fact, nor do Kroos, 'Schweini' or Hummels, with only Alaba coming anywhere near Musiala as bundesliga.com takes a look at the record German champions' most youthful Hall of Fame.
1) Jamal Musiala: 17 years, 115 days on 20 June, 2020
Playing for Bayern at any age is quite an achievement for a professional footballer, but having barely turned 17 and getting to play alongside iconic forward Robert Lewandowski and a trio of FIFA World Cup winners in Jerome Boateng, Benjamin Pavard and Lucas Hernandez is the stuff of dreams.
They came true for Musiala on Matchday 33 when he came off the bench in the newly crowned champions' 3-1 win over Freiburg. It may have only been for two minutes, but - along with fellow debutant Chris Richards, a relative veteran at 20 - it was reward for the work Musiala has put in at Bayern's productive youth academy since joining from Chelsea last summer, and which saw him promoted to the Bavarian juggernaut's 3. Liga-topping reserve team
"Jamal Musiala and Chris Richards, both of them are really on the right track," said coach Hansi Flick. "That's why we rewarded both of them with a taste of the Bundesliga."
"The boys who are coming through have quality," said Thomas Müller, yet another FIFA World Cup winner and the man who made way for Musiala. "They know what football is about."
2) Pierre-Emile Höjbjerg: 17 years, 251 days on 13 April, 2013
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The artful Danish midfielder, who modelled his game on that of his idol, Zinedine Zidane, joined Bayern in July 2012 and made his Bundesliga debut nine months later during Bayern's historic treble-winning season.
He replaced Xherdan Shaqiri for the final 19 minutes of a 4-0 win over Nuremberg on Matchday 29, and then played a single minute of the 1-1 Klassiker draw with Borussia Dortmund three games later as coach Jupp Heynckes gave him a glimpse of the rarefied atmosphere of a first-team dressing room that contained the likes of Arjen Robben, Franck Ribery and Philipp Lahm.
He would go on to make a further 15 first-team appearances for Bayern over the next two seasons before looking for more playing time by first joining Augsburg and Schalke on loan, and then making the summer 2016 switch to his current club, English Premier League outfit Southampton.
"My biggest weakness at the time was my impatience," said Höjbjerg of his spell at Bayern, where he claimed two Bundesliga titles, a pair of DFB Cups and the 2012/13 UEFA Champions League. "I wasn't ready to wait for one, two or three years for my breakthrough. I wanted to be important right away."
3) David Alaba: 17 years, 255 days on 6 March, 2010
While Musiala can learn from Höjbjerg's inability to play a waiting game to establish himself at Bayern, he can look to Alaba to see that it can be done. The Austria international was called upon by Louis van Gaal in early March 2010 when Diego Contento was injured late in a 1-1 draw at Cologne.
Three days later, Alaba became Bayern's youngest UEFA Champions League debutant in the Last 16 second leg against Fiorentina. "He did very well," said CEO Karl-Heinz Rummenigge. "You couldn't tell it was his first Champions League game."
Alaba only played two more league matches that season, but a loan move to Hoffenheim in the second half of the 2010/11 campaign kickstarted his Bundesliga career. Like Lahm or Kroos, he returned to Bayern to be a first-team regular. Nearly 250 Bundesliga games later, he still is.
4) Toni Kroos: 17 years, 265 days on 26 September, 2007
The current Real Madrid midfielder made the most explosive Bundesliga debut for Bayern of any of the young guns in the top 10. There were just 18 minutes left of the Matchday 7 encounter with Energie Cottbus when Kroos replaced Ze Roberto. With Bayern leading 3-0, the game was already won, but the fledgling was determined to make an impact.
And didn't he do just that? He had two assists come the final whistle, teeing up Miroslav Klose for a pair of headers as Bayern romped to all three points and boss Ottmar Hitzfeld found himself with a new option for his midfield.
Kroos eventually made 12 league appearances in total that season, and following his blooming at Bayer Leverkusen while on loan in the following two campaigns, he came back to the Allianz Arena to play a significant role over the next four years before moving to Madrid.
5) Gianluca Gaudino: 17 years, 284 days on 22 August, 2014
Gaudino's father, Maurizio, had played in the Bundesliga, so football was in Gianluca's genes. He joined Bayern's youth academy before his eighth birthday, and worked his way up to the first team.
Training with the club's global stars and under the tutelage of Pep Guardiola, Gaudino featured in the Supercup against Dortmund and the DFB Cup before he made his Bundesliga debut for the club in a 2-1 win against Wolfsburg.
The dream then faded for Gaudino, at least at Bayern. The eight league appearances he made that season were his only ones for the club, and after a loan spell at St. Gallen he left for Italian side Chievo in 2017 before joining another Swiss outfit, Young Boys, in 2019.
6) Berkant Göktan: 17 years, 296 days on 4 October, 1998
The Munich-born striker had joined Bayern aged nine, and was just 16 when Giovanni Trapattoni called him up to train with the first-team squad.
It was under Hitzfeld, though, that he made his league debut, but not before he had faced Manchester United in a UEFA Champions League group stage game, a prelude for that season's final.
He played just 12 minutes on his league debut - a 2-2 draw at home to Dortmund - and it would be his only time on the pitch for the club until he appeared in his second and final league game for them, featuring for eight minutes in a 2-1 win at Cologne on Matchday 6 of the 2000/01 season.
In between, he had made a total of 19 Bundesliga appearances during loan spells at Borussia Mönchengladbach and Arminia Bielefeld. He flickered briefly at Galatasaray, and did shine over two Bundesliga 2 campaigns for 1860 Munich later in his career, but he would never fulfil his early promise.
7) Franck Evina: 17 years, 297 days on 28 April 2018
When Heynckes was looking for promising youngsters to blood when he wanted to rest his first-team starters for a game in between the UEFA Champions League semi-final with Real Madrid, Evina was one he picked out.
The Cameroon-born left-winger had been performing well for Bayern's second string that season, even scoring three times, and Heynckes gave him an opportunity to stand in for Ribery and help the team to a comfortable 4-1 home win over Eintracht Frankfurt.
Evina also played 45 minutes of the following match - a 3-1 triumph at Cologne - before disappearing from the first-team picture. He made nine Bundesliga 2 appearances for Holstein Kiel in 2018/19 while on loan and has enjoyed a fruitful 2019/20 campaign in German football's third tier with KFC Uerdingen on another loan move.
8) Roque Santa Cruz: 18 years, 6 days on 22 August, 1999
While Peruvian Claudio Pizarro was making a name for himself at Werder Bremen, Bayern's Paraguayan prodigy was forging his own reputation in the Bundesliga.
Spotted at the 1999 FIFA World Youth Championship where he played against a Germany squad featuring Timo Hildebrand, Santa Cruz made his Bundesliga debut on Matchday 2 of the 1999/00 season in a 2-0 defeat at Leverkusen
Not the most auspicious of starts, but it quickly got better as he grabbed his first German top-flight goal - the winner against Unterhaching - in the very next game, the first of five he would net in 28 league matches that term.
He eventually scored 31 times in 155 Bundesliga appearances for the club and won five league titles, four DFB Cups, the 2000/01 Champions League and Intercontinental Cup, but was rarely more than a useful option to bring off the bench, and he left for English Premier League side Blackburn Rovers in 2007.
After subsequent spells in Spain and Mexico, he is still playing - at the age of 38 - for Olimpia Asuncion, the same club Bayern bought him from over two decades ago.
9) Lukas Mai: 18 years, 21 days on 21 April, 2018
Like Evina, Mai got his chance with Heynckes' and Bayern's priorities elsewhere than on the league, no surprise given they had already wrapped up the domestic title.
After taking part in the winter training camp in Qatar that same year, the Dresden-born defender got his first-team opportunity playing alongside Boateng in a side captained by Robben in a 3-0 win at Hannover.
He started the next game too — featuring with Hummels are the heart of the defence — as Bayern won 4-1 at home to Frankfurt. He remains at Bayern, and was an integral part of the reserve team's third-tier campaign in 2019/20, but he has not played again for the first team.
10) Max Eberl: 18 years, 28 days on 19 October, 1991
Most Bundesliga fans will know Eberl as Gladbach's sporting director, but he was once a player at Bayern. Bavarian-born, Eberl was tipped as a future star, and was connected to the club from the tender age of six.
He worked his way through the ranks and made his first-team debut as a centre-back in a 3-2 loss at Stuttgart, for whom Maurizio Gaudino scored. Eberl watched the second half from the bench after being replaced by Bruno Labbadia at the interval, and was never seen in a Bayern shirt on the Bundesliga stage again.
He did, however, play at the top level for Bochum and Gladbach before retiring in 2004 to follow his successful post-career path.
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