Bayern Munich are Bundesliga champions again, and Michael Olise is making his Ballon d'Or case in real time

Bayern Munich clinched their 34th Bundesliga title on Sunday, coming from behind to beat Stuttgart at the Allianz Arena and wrap up the league with three games to spare. Vincent Kompany's side have been dominant in Germany all season, scoring 100 league goals for the first time since 2019-20, and going 18 matches unbeaten at the start of the campaign.

Harry Kane, with three Bundesliga hat-tricks and ten penalties scored from ten taken, has been the headline act throughout. But increasingly, with the Champions League semi-finals now approaching against PSG, the name that comes up in the same breath as the England captain is the one wearing number 25, the 24-year-old from Hammersmith who just led the entire Bundesliga in assists.

Michael Olise is having the season of his life. In the Bundesliga this season, Olise has 12 goals and 20 assists in 28 appearances. The assists lead the league, six clear of his nearest competitor, his own teammate Luis Díaz. Across all competitions, he has 18 goals and 29 assists in 44 matches.

Olise is a left-footed right winger who cuts inside through tight spaces with a tempo and a directness that very few players in Europe replicate. He grew up idolising Neymar, and you can see it in the way he moves with the ball. The quick turns, the change of pace when he seems to have nowhere to go, the ability to carry at full speed in areas where most players would slow down or lay it off. What's evolved at Bayern, compared to Crystal Palace, is the final product.

He was always creative. He has become more decisive. His crossing from the right has become one of the weapons Bayern use most consistently, picking out Kane in positions that the striker can do something with. That combination, an incisive, left-footed winger in perfect service of a striker who wants the ball into the box, is what Bayern have built their most productive moments around all season.

Olise has four goals and seven assists in the Champions League this season, helping Bayern reach the semi-finals against PSG.

The complication in the Ballon d'Or conversation, as always, is the competition. Harry Kane is having what might be the greatest striker season in Bundesliga history, with three hat-tricks, 500 career goals passed in February, and a level of consistency across big and small games that would normally make him the obvious frontrunner. Both men are at the same club, which raises the question, can Bayern have two genuine individual award contenders in the same forward line in the same season?

The Ballon d'Or historically favours attackers on the best teams who perform in the biggest games, and both Kane and Olise have done exactly that. What Olise has over Kane in the narrative is that the France international is new. We have been watching Kane's brilliance for years. Olise's rise at this level, from a Crystal Palace player who barely featured a full season two years ago to the Bundesliga's leading creator and a Champions League match-winner, is the kind of story that voters respond to.

There's also the World Cup. Olise plays for France, has locked down a starting spot in Didier Deschamps' side, and is expected to be one of their key creative players in North America this summer.

If France go deep and Olise performs, the case becomes very difficult to argue against. If the World Cup falls short, the club season alone may not be enough to beat whoever else has a strong tournament.

But he's built the foundation across nine months in Bayern's first-choice system, and the foundation is as solid as any player in Europe this season.

He said, in Bayern's own magazine, that he wants to step up in the big moments and leave a legacy.