After two completely failed loans, Nick Salihamidzic is missing from the reserve training camp squad. It is unclear how things will continue with the 20-year-old son of former sports director Hasan Salihamidzic at Bayern Munich.
First the good news: Nick Salihamidzic made his international debut in the spring. At the end of March he came on as a substitute in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s U21s 2-0 win over their Chinese peers. Although he was born in Munich, he also has a Bosnian passport because of his father’s origins. Hasan Salihamidzic once played 43 games for the newly independent country after fleeing the civil war.
In the following international match phase in June, Nick Salihamidzic was again absent from the Bosnian U21 squad. But the debut alone was enough for him to play more games for his country than for his club in the second half of the season. During the six-month loan to the Italian second division club Cosenza Calcio, the right-back was not used for a single second.
From the bench (or the stands) he had to watch his team crawl around in the table basement. Ultimately, the relegation against Brescia Calcio managed to stay up in the league. As expected, there was no permanent transfer. Salihamidzic returned to Munich, where he is still under contract until 2025.
Nick Salihamidzic: Unclear future at Bayern
However, his future at Bayern is completely unclear: he is out of the question for the professional team of coach Thomas Tuchel, and he is missing from the squad at the current reserve training camp in Austria. His father was relieved of his position as sports director at the end of May, and shortly afterwards Nick Salihamidzic also indicated his own farewell. “It’s a shame it had to end like this. Good luck to the club and to all the fans in the future,” he wrote on Twitter. “We say goodbye as a family.”
Salihamidzic came to Bayern Munich at the age of twelve and then went through the various youth teams. However, he did not succeed in becoming a regular in the fourth-rate reserve. Also due to injury, he only played two competitive games for the second substitution in 2021.
Hoping for more match practice, Salihamidzic switched to MLS club Vancouver Whitecaps a year ago and announced quite ambitiously on Twitter: “Half a year to get fit, then MLS.” In fact, it was only enough for five appearances for Vancouver’s reserve before the loan, which was actually planned until this summer, was prematurely broken off in winter.
The change came about thanks to the good relations between the two clubs. In 2019, the then 19-year-old Alphonso Davies moved from Vancouver to Munich and, with a transfer fee of ten million euros, became the most expensive sale in the club’s history.
Vancouver boss Axel Schuster on the failed loan
The Whitecaps now have a German managing director in Cologne-based Axel Schuster, who once worked for FSV Mainz 05 and FC Schalke 04. Salihamidzic’s failed loan was due to “a lot of things that came together unhappily,” reveals Schuster in an interview with SPOX and GOAL.
“Because we play by calendar years, he came in the middle of the season and also from a long injury. In his first appearances he had problems with the physical way of playing. Nick also suffered from the distance from his family. He felt unhappy, was lost a bit. When he got injured again, he lost faith that it could still work.”
Apart from the Cosenza offer, according to Schuster, Salihamidzic had other offers in winter “because he was well advised and his family has a large network”. As is well known, the move to Cosenza turned out to be the wrong decision – but now Hasan Salihamidzic has plenty of time to plan further career steps together with his son.
