As good as Kane has been tonight, Upa is undoubtedly the motm. The football world would never acknowledge him as the best itw, but the people that get it, get it.
You can’t present every youth player with a credible pathway into the first team. At the moment, Lennart Karl, who is higher rated than Licina and a year younger, is being integrated into the first team in Licina’s positions, which means there are currently no development opportunities for Licina.
So how can the club still offer him a believable perspective with the first team?
Licina is a very fine footballer, but he has by no means performed as outstandingly in youth football as, for example, Karl, Fernandez, Wanner, Ibrahimović or Mike. While he is technically highly skilled, he remains too much of a “fair-weather player” and has never truly managed to convert his technical talent into more result-oriented output. Losing him would certainly hurt, particularly given that he is a complete academy product, having joined the club at the age of eight. Nevertheless, his departure would ultimately be the expected, and at the same time understandable, course of things.
Whether you make it at Bayern has a lot to do with timing, and Licina’s door was open for a certain period last summer. By now, though, it seems to have closed, since another player has claimed the development resources for his positions in the first team. That’s life.