What is Going on With Jamal Musiala?

German football was rocked earlier this month when Bayern Munich’s young star midfielder Jamal Musiala collapsed on the pitch not once, but twice in three days during preseason matches against Leipzig and Heidenheim. In fact, Musiala did not so much collapse as suffer a sort of seizure. Video images of the Leipzig incident show him gradually stiffening up and then crouching unsteadily, before teammate Ismael Saibari comes running to his aid and gently lowers him to the ground.

The Leipzig incident was initially, and rather implausibly, attributed to heat exhaustion in German reports. But after the second incident, the club admitted that the 23 year-old was suffering from ongoing neurological problems. The seizures in the Leipzig and Heidenheim games were apparently not the first seizures that Musiala had suffered, just the first that took place in front of packed football stadiums and tens of thousands of other fans via livestream. In an Instagram post, while conceding that the seizures looked “scary”, Musiala himself said that they had become part of his “everyday life”.

Just when exactly they began, we do not know. But while the mainstream German media, needless to say, scrupulously avoided the issue, critical German voices on social media did not hesitate to wonder whether Musiala’s neurological problems might not have been triggered by COVID-19 vaccination. If so, then Musiala’s case is particularly tragic, since as numerous German commentators recalled, Musiala had been part of a small group of Bayern players who initially refused to get the Covid jab due to doubts about its safety. Serge Gnabry and Joshua Kimmich were two other prominent refuseniks.

It was only after being subject to enormous pressure both in the media and by the club itself, that Musiala and Gnabry caved in and reportedly got the jab in late November 2021. See the below headline from the German news magazine Der Spiegel, which reads: ‘Now They’re Vaccinated After All: Gnabry and Musiala Reconsider.’

As first reported in the German tabloid Bild, Bayern management had even decided a few days earlier to withhold the pay of unvaccinated players for time that they had had to spend in quarantine – not because they had tested positive for Covid but because they had come into contact with vaccinated players who had!

Joshua Kimmich continued, nonetheless, to hold out, thus briefly becoming, in effect, public enemy number one in the German media. Three weeks later, in mid-December, he finally threw in the towel, making a much publicised mea culpa on Germany’s ZDF public television and announcing that he would get the jab at some unspecified future date. Bizarrely enough, Kimmich made this announcement just shortly after he had himself reportedly had Covid and recovered without any particularly ill effect.

Other Bayern stars would go on to suffer significant health scares in the ensuing months. Fullback Alphonso Davies was diagnosed with myocarditis in January 2022 and would be held out of play until April. Bayern goalkeeping legend Manuel Neuer underwent surgery for skin cancer. But, perhaps most astonishingly, no fewer than four players in the German Bundesliga as a whole – Timo Baumgartl, Marco Richter, Sébastien Haller und Jean Paul Boetius – were diagnosed with testicular cancer in just the five months from April 2022 to September of the same year. There are not even 600 players in the Bundesliga.

Musiala’s seizures are reminiscent of the case of John Fleck, the Scottish footballer who suffered a seizure on the pitch while playing for Sheffield United in a game on November 23rd 2021 – the very day that it was first announced that Musiala and Gnabry had finally got vaccinated. In January 2025, Fleck, having in the meanwhile moved on to Chesterfield, suffered another episode – what a Chesterfield official described as a “fit” – during warm-ups for a game. The Chesterfield manager said that Fleck had gone off his medications.

Similarly, Bayern officials have claimed that Musiala’s seizures were a result of a change in his medications. Although he missed Bayern’s season opener on Friday, he is reportedly back in training and manager Vincent Kompany insists that he will play again. “He is getting used to the increased dose of the medication,” Kompany said in a press conference on Thursday, “he’s reacting well to it.”

John Rosenthal is a journalist and political analyst who writes on European politics and transatlantic issues. You can subscribe to his Transatlantic Intelligencer Substack here.