David Alaba: Free-kicks, fair play and records broken at Bayern Munich

Munich, Feb 16: Bayern Munich star David Alaba has confirmed he will leave the world champions when his contract expires at the end of the season.

The versatile defender came through the youth ranks at Bayern but will end his 13-year association with the club after the 2020-21 campaign, he confirmed on Tuesday.

Alaba has not yet disclosed his next destination, though the 28-year-old has been heavily linked with a switch to Real Madrid.

Barcelona, along with Premier League giants Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Chelsea, have all been credited with an interest too.

With Alaba's Bayern career now months away from concluding, we have looked at some of his most significant Opta statistics.

MAKING HIS MARK EARLY

Alaba made his Bayern debut in a DFB-Pokal meeting with Greuther Furth in February 2010.

In doing so he became the club's youngest player in history at the time and went on to set up a goal for Franck Ribery within a minute of entering the pitch.

The Austrian was 17 years, seven months and 18 days old when he made his debut, but Jamal Musiala has since usurped him to become Bayern's youngest debutant.

Alaba has gone on to make 415 appearances for the Bavarian giants, scoring 33 goals and supplying 44 assists in all competitions.

He has racked up 24 trophies, lifting the Bundesliga trophy nine times and winning the Champions League twice – both of those European successes forming part of trebles.

The only other active player at Bayern to have reached nine titles is Thomas Muller, an achievement also accomplished by former team-mate Ribery.

Neither of those players were as young as Alaba (27) at the time of winning their ninth title, though.

And Bayern are five points clear at the top of the table as Alaba seeks his 10th before departing.

FAIR PLAY AND FREE-KICKS

Remarkably, in his 12 Bundesliga seasons, Alaba has never been suspended for accumulating too many yellow cards.

The 2018-19 campaign was the first time he even reached four bookings and he has just one in 20 top-flight outings this season.

Alaba has never been sent off in his professional career for club or country.

Additionally, he has been a free-kick specialist, scoring seven direct free-kicks for Bayern in the league, though his last came in August 2019.

RECORD BREAKER

If he plays 10 more matches, Alaba will replace Ribery as the foreign player with the most Bayern appearances.

He has won 73 per cent of his Bundesliga games (209 out of 286) - among all players with at least 250 appearances in Germany's top flight, no one can better that.

Alaba needed only 272 Bundesliga games for his first 200 wins - no other player the competition's history needed so few games for his first 200 wins.

Team-mates Muller (275) and Robert Lewandowski (280) are next on the list. In terms of titles, win percentage and goals scored, Alaba's most successful period was the treble season under Jupp Heynckes (2012-13) and the following season – Bayern’s first campaign under Pep Guardiola. In that 2013-14 campaign, he had 13 goal involvements (four goals, nine assists) and has not come close to that number since.

Alaba played 49 times that year and Bayern won 39 of those matches.

The Heynckes treble season and the 2014-15 campaign were his most productive for goals, with Alaba scoring five times in each.