Bayern Munich

Munich's football scene in 1900 ran through a gymnastics association that refused to add a football section, so seventeen members walked out and formed their own club instead — a split born of a committee vote, not a rivalry. That was 27 February 1900. The Allianz Arena, the ground the club has occupied since 2005, holds 75,000 for Bundesliga and domestic cup fixtures, scaled down to 70,000 when UEFA competitions apply their own regulations.

What followed took decades to build momentum: a first national title in 1932, then a gap of 37 years before the next. Since 1969 the championships have piled up at a rate few European leagues have seen from a single club — 35 German titles in total, most recently in 2026, alongside 21 wins in the DFB-Pokal. The European Cup arrived first as a run of three straight finals won from 1974 to 1976, then, after a long wait, further European Cup/Champions League titles in 2001, 2013 and 2020.

The city has its own fixture line running through this history: the Munich derby against 1860 München, the club Bayern's founders left behind in spirit if not in name, played out across decades in whichever divisions have put the two sides in the same table.

Ask who defines the club and Bavarian football answers with one name before any other: Franz Beckenbauer, who captained Bayern through the mid-1970s European Cup run and later returned to shape it from the boardroom, the player most associated with turning a Munich breakaway club into the standard by which German football measures itself.