Transcript
On the evening of 27 February 1900, eleven young footballers walked out of a meeting in Munich and founded a club. The congregation they had just left, a gymnastics association called MTV 1879, had voted to bar its football players from joining the German Football Association. The eleven men did not argue further. They left, and that same night they formed Fußball-Club Bayern München. Within months, the new club was beating every local rival in sight, including one 15–0 thrashing of a side called Nordstern. Bayern had announced itself.
The city they were born into was Munich, the capital of Bavaria, a proud southern German city with its own identity, its own dialect, and its own stubbornness. That stubbornness would become the club's defining quality. By 1910, Bayern had its first German national team player in Max Gablonsky. By 1920, the club had grown to more than 700 members, making it the largest football club in Munich. They were not yet the biggest name in German football, but they were building toward it with a patience that looked, to outsiders, almost reckless.
In 1911, Bayern joined the newly founded regional Bavarian league and won it in their first year. Progress at the national level came more slowly. It was not until 1926 that Bayern won their first South German championship, a feat they repeated two years later. Then, in 1932, coach Richard Kohn, known affectionately as Little Dombi, led the team to the German national championship, defeating Eintracht Frankfurt 2–0 in the final. It was the summit of the club's early ambition. It would not last.
The rise of Adolf Hitler in 1933 tore through Bayern Munich with particular violence. The club's president, Kurt Landauer, was Jewish, as was the coach. Both fled the country. Others inside the club were purged. Bayern was publicly mocked as the 'Jew's club', and local rival 1860 Munich, riding the wave of Nazi approval, gained enormous support. The discrimination was sustained and deliberate, and it hollowed out a club that had only just found its footing at the top of German football.
A telling detail captures the atmosphere: during a friendly match in Switzerland, some Bayern players greeted Landauer, who was watching in the crowd, and the club was punished for it with further harassment. The damage ran deeper than personnel. Bayern lost gifted young centre-forward Oskar Rohr, who moved to Switzerland when a ruling forced football players back to amateur status. Through the rest of the 1930s and into the war years, Bayern managed only mid-table results in their regional league. The club that had won the national title in 1932 was, within a decade, a shadow of itself.
After the Second World War ended in 1945, Bayern entered the Oberliga Süd, one of five regional first divisions into which German football had been split. The recovery was painful. The club hired and fired thirteen coaches between 1945 and 1963. Landauer returned from exile in 1947 and was reappointed president, a position he held until 1951; he remains the club's longest-serving president in accumulated tenure. He is remembered as the most important figure in Bayern's transition to a professional club. But even his return could not immediately restore the club's fortunes.
The 1950s brought a brush with bankruptcy. A new president, the industrialist Roland Endler, provided financial stability after 1958, and Bayern enjoyed their best years in the Oberliga under his watch. Then, in 1963, came the moment that threatened to define Bayern by its humiliation rather than its ambition. Germany consolidated its regional leagues into one national competition, the Bundesliga. Five clubs from the Oberliga South were admitted. Bayern, ranked only sixth by accumulated record over the previous twelve years, did not make the cut. Their local rival 1860 Munich, ranked seventh but winners of the final Oberliga season, were given preference. Bayern were left outside.
President Wilhelm Neudecker, who had made his money in the postwar construction boom, refused to accept the situation. He hired a Yugoslav coach named Zlatko Čajkovski, who had led a different club to the national championship in 1962, and set him to work with a group of young players who would become the most celebrated generation in German football history. Franz Beckenbauer, a composed and technically brilliant defender who would reinvent his position entirely, was a teenager. Gerd Müller, a squat and lethal centre-forward, was barely older. Sepp Maier guarded the goal. Together they were called simply the axis. In 1965, they won promotion to the Bundesliga.
The axis hit the Bundesliga like a force of nature. In their first season, Bayern finished third and won the DFB-Pokal, the German domestic cup competition. That cup win qualified them for the European Cup Winners' Cup, a continental tournament for domestic cup holders, and in 1967 they won it, Franz Roth scoring the only goal in extra time against Scottish club Rangers. Bayern retained the DFB-Pokal in the same year. A new coach, Branko Zebec, replaced Bayern's freewheeling attack with discipline, and in 1969 the club won the first league and cup double in Bundesliga history, using only thirteen players across the entire season.
Under coach Udo Lattek, who took charge in 1970, Bayern became the dominant force in German football. They won the DFB-Pokal in Lattek's first season, then led the club to the German championship. The title-deciding match in the 1971–72 season against Schalke was the first game ever played in Munich's new Olympiastadion, built for the 1972 Summer Olympics, and also the first live televised match in Bundesliga history. Bayern won it 5–1 and set records for points gained and goals scored in a season. Two more championships followed. The axis was at its peak. Europe was next.
Read full transcript (28 more paragraphs)
The 1974 European Cup final, the continent's premier club competition, was played in Brussels. Bayern faced Atlético Madrid. The first match ended in a draw, and a replay was scheduled. In the replay, Bayern were utterly dominant. They won 4–0. It was the club's first European Cup, and it announced Bayern as a genuine continental power after years of near-misses. Beckenbauer lifted the trophy. Müller, who had scored 68 goals in the 1971–72 season alone, was at the height of his powers. Bayern had arrived.
They came back to defend it the following year. The 1975 final against Leeds United in Paris was closer than the scoreline suggested. Leeds, considered by many the best English club of the era, pressed hard. Bayern were under pressure for long stretches. Then, late in the match, Roth and Müller scored. Bayern won 2–1. Beckenbauer acknowledged afterward that his side had been lucky. Leeds fans, furious at what they believed was a partial French referee, rioted in Paris. The club was banned from European football for three years. Bayern had won, though the manner of it left a complicated taste.
A year later, in Glasgow, Bayern completed something rare: three consecutive European Cups. Another Roth goal helped defeat Saint-Étienne in the final, and Bayern became only the third club in history to win the trophy in three straight years. They added the Intercontinental Cup that same era, defeating Brazilian club Cruzeiro over two legs. Then the era ended. In 1977, Beckenbauer left for New York Cosmos. By 1979, Maier and Uli Hoeneß had retired, and Müller had joined a club in Fort Lauderdale. The word Bayerndusel entered the German football vocabulary, a term meaning the narrow, last-minute luck that opponents felt Bayern always seemed to find. It was not entirely a compliment.
The 1980s brought a different kind of Bayern. On the pitch, forward Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and midfielder Paul Breitner, nicknamed together as FC Breitnigge, drove the club to Bundesliga titles in 1980 and 1981. A DFB-Pokal win in 1982 was followed by Breitner's retirement, but the returning coach Lattek then guided Bayern to five Bundesliga championships in six seasons, including a double in 1986. European glory, however, remained elusive: Bayern were runners-up in the European Cup in both 1982 and 1987, losing finals they had expected to win.
Off the pitch, the decade was turbulent. Personnel changed constantly, finances were strained, and the club's identity seemed to shift with each new coach. Jupp Heynckes arrived in 1987 and won back-to-back championships in 1989 and 1990, but form then collapsed. In 1991–92, Bayern finished just five points above the relegation zone, the closest the club had come to the abyss since the 1950s. The nadir came in 1993–94, when Bayern were knocked out of the UEFA Cup in the second round by Norwich City, a mid-table English club, the only English side ever to beat Bayern at the Olympiastadion.
Franz Beckenbauer, the great captain of the 1970s, returned as coach for the second half of the 1993–94 season and won the championship again after a four-year gap. He then became club president. His coaching successors struggled to meet expectations, and the players' off-field escapades filled gossip columns rather than back pages. The nickname FC Hollywood stuck, and it was not affectionate. Beckenbauer briefly returned as caretaker at the end of the 1995–96 season and led the club to victory in the UEFA Cup, beating Bordeaux in the final. It was a reminder of what Bayern could be when focused. The focus, though, kept slipping.
Ottmar Hitzfeld, fresh from success with Borussia Dortmund, took over in 1998. In his first season, Bayern won the Bundesliga and came agonisingly close to the Champions League title. They led Manchester United in the final at Barcelona's Camp Nou with minutes remaining. Then United scored twice in injury time. Bayern lost 2–1. It remains one of the most dramatic reversals in the history of the competition. The players who had been warming up to receive their winners' medals had to put them back. The pain was acute.
Bayern responded by winning the league and cup double in their centenary season of 1999–2000. A third consecutive Bundesliga title followed in 2001, secured with a stoppage-time goal on the final day of the season. Days later, Bayern faced Valencia in the Champions League final in Milan. The match went to penalties. Bayern held their nerve. They won. It was their first European title in twenty-five years, and the relief was enormous. The 2001–02 season began with a win in the Intercontinental Cup, and in 2002–03 Bayern dominated the Bundesliga so completely that they finished sixteen points clear of the field.
Hitzfeld's reign ended in 2004, undermined by a humiliating DFB-Pokal defeat to Alemannia Aachen, a second-division club. His replacement, Felix Magath, won back-to-back doubles in 2005 and 2006. Before the 2005–06 season, Bayern left the Olympiastadion, their home for thirty-three years, and moved into the new Allianz Arena on the northern outskirts of Munich. The stadium's outer shell is translucent and illuminates in red for Bayern home games. It holds around seventy-five thousand supporters. Every Bundesliga match has been sold out for years.
Magath was sacked in early 2007 after erratic performances, and Hitzfeld returned to steady the ship, but Bayern finished fourth in 2006–07, missing the Champions League for the first time in more than a decade. The club needed rebuilding. For the 2007–08 season, they signed a group of players including Franck Ribéry and Luca Toni, won the Bundesliga without ever dropping out of first place, and won the DFB-Pokal against Borussia Dortmund. Then goalkeeper Oliver Kahn retired, leaving a gap that would take years to fill, and the instability continued: the next coach, Jürgen Klinsmann, was sacked mid-season.
The arrival of Dutch manager Louis van Gaal in 2009 changed the shape of Bayern's football. He brought Dutch winger Arjen Robben, who joined the existing Ribéry, and the two became the axis around which Bayern attacked for the next decade. The press called them Robbery. Van Gaal also promoted two young players to the first team: David Alaba and Thomas Müller. Of Müller he said simply: 'With me, Müller always plays.' The phrase became one of the most quoted in the club's modern history. Bayern reached the Champions League final in 2010 but lost to Inter Milan.
Van Gaal was sacked in April 2011. Heynckes returned for a second permanent spell, and Bayern signed goalkeeper Manuel Neuer, ending the long search for a successor to Kahn. But 2011–12 brought more pain: Borussia Dortmund won both the Bundesliga and the DFB-Pokal, and the Champions League final was held at the Allianz Arena itself. Bayern reached their own home final. They lost to Chelsea on penalties. To lose a final in your own stadium, in front of your own supporters, was a particular kind of wound.
The 2012–13 season was the answer to everything. Bayern won the Bundesliga with 91 points, the most in the competition's history and only eleven shy of a perfect season. In the Champions League final, they beat Borussia Dortmund 2–1 in a German-only final at Wembley. A week later, they completed the treble by winning the DFB-Pokal. Bayern became the first German club to win all three domestic and European trophies in a single season. It was the most complete year in the club's history. The wait since 1976 was over.
The club then announced that Pep Guardiola, one of the most celebrated coaches in the world, would take over from Heynckes. Uli Hoeneß, the club's president and the man who had played for Bayern in the 1970s, later admitted that Heynckes had not chosen to leave: the club had pushed him out to make room for Guardiola. Guardiola's first season added the FIFA Club World Cup and the UEFA Super Cup, the last major trophy Bayern had not previously won, and the Bundesliga title. His three years brought two more league titles and a domestic double, but never a Champions League. He left after his contract expired.
In March 2014, Hoeneß was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to three and a half years in prison. He resigned the presidency the following day. It was a public fall for the man who had shaped Bayern's modern identity more than any other figure since Beckenbauer. Carlo Ancelotti was hired as Guardiola's successor and won a fifth consecutive league title. But when Bayern lost 3–0 to Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League in September 2017, Ancelotti was sacked the same week. Jupp Heynckes, by then seventy-three years old and firmly retired, agreed to return for a fourth spell. He led Bayern to the title before finally stepping away for good.
Kovač succeeded Heynckes and won the seventh straight Bundesliga title in 2019, finishing two points above Dortmund. The same week, Bayern beat RB Leipzig 3–0 in the DFB-Pokal final to complete a twelfth domestic double. It was Ribéry's ninth league title and Robben's eighth. Both then retired, ending an era. Kovač was sacked in November 2019 after a 5–1 league loss to Eintracht Frankfurt, and assistant Hansi Flick was promoted to interim manager. Within weeks it was clear Flick was no interim.
Under Flick, Bayern won the 2019–20 Bundesliga having lost only one match in the second half of the season. In the Champions League, they beat Barcelona 8–2 in the quarter-finals, a result that shook European football, and then defeated Paris Saint-Germain 1–0 in the final, held in Lisbon behind closed doors because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Former PSG player Kingsley Coman scored the only goal. Bayern had won the treble for the second time. No European club other than Barcelona had ever done it twice.
The 2020–21 season brought more. Bayern won the UEFA Super Cup, then the FIFA Club World Cup, defeating a Mexican club in the final. They became only the second club in history to win the sextuple: all six available trophies across two consecutive seasons. During that same campaign, striker Robert Lewandowski broke Gerd Müller's record for most goals in a single Bundesliga season, scoring forty-one times in twenty-nine matches. It was a record that had stood for nearly fifty years. Müller had scored forty in 1971–72. Lewandowski passed it with games to spare.
Flick left to manage the German national team in 2021. His replacement, Julian Nagelsmann, arrived from RB Leipzig for a reported fee of around twenty-five million euros, a world record for a managerial appointment. Bayern won their tenth consecutive Bundesliga title under him. In March 2023, Nagelsmann was released and replaced by Thomas Tuchel, who led the club to a record eleventh consecutive title in 2022–23, edging out Dortmund in a close race. In August 2023, Bayern broke the German transfer record again by signing Harry Kane, the England captain, from Tottenham Hotspur for around a hundred and ten million euros.
The 2023–24 season ended the streak. Bayer Leverkusen, playing the most consistent football in the Bundesliga's modern history, won the title. Bayern went trophyless for the first time in twelve years. Tuchel and the club parted ways. It was, by Bayern's own standards, a crisis, though by anyone else's measure it was simply a single difficult season. The question was who would come next.
In May 2024, the Belgian coach Vincent Kompany was confirmed as Bayern's new head coach on a three-year contract. Kompany had built his reputation at Burnley and then at Anderlecht, but this was a different scale entirely. Bayern started the 2024–25 Bundesliga with a 3–2 win at Wolfsburg, and on 5 May 2025, they were confirmed as champions with two games remaining, winning their thirty-third Bundesliga title. The season also marked the departure of Thomas Müller, who had spent twenty-five years at the club including seventeen full seasons with the first team. He left as the club's all-time record appearance holder with seven hundred and fifty-six caps across all competitions, and with thirty-three titles to his name. No player in the club's history had won more.
The 2025–26 season opened with extraordinary momentum. Bayern set a new record across Europe's top five leagues by winning sixteen consecutive matches across all competitions, surpassing a record held by AC Milan since the 1992–93 season. Kane, now fully embedded in the side, was the focal point of an attack that scored goals in torrents. Bayern surpassed their own previous record of a hundred and one league goals in a season, set in 1971–72, reaching a hundred and five by matchday twenty-nine alone. The club renamed the DFL-Supercup the Franz Beckenbauer Supercup in honour of their greatest player, who had died in 2024, and won it to open the season.
On matchday thirty of the 2025–26 Bundesliga, Bayern won 4–2 at home over Stuttgart to clinch their thirty-fourth Bundesliga title, their thirty-fifth German championship in total, with four matches still to play. In the DFB-Pokal, they reached the final for the first time since 2020, defeating Bayer Leverkusen in the semi-finals. In the Champions League, they were eliminated by Paris Saint-Germain, the holders, in a return leg in Munich that was overshadowed by controversial refereeing decisions.
The cup final against Stuttgart, the holders, was settled in the second half. Kane put Bayern ahead, then scored again, then scored a third. He completed a hat-trick in the final. He finished the season with sixty-one goals in fifty-one games across all competitions and won the European Golden Shoe for the second time in his career, both times as a Bayern player. The domestic double was complete: the club's first in six years. Bayern had answered the one difficult season with something close to perfection.
By the autumn of 2025, Bayern had more than four hundred and thirty thousand official club members, making them the largest sports club in the world by membership. The Allianz Arena sells out every Bundesliga match. The club operates departments for chess, handball, basketball, table tennis, gymnastics, and more. Their commercial revenue rivals the very largest clubs in the world, and in the 2024–25 season they generated close to a billion euros. They have opened offices in New York, Shanghai, Bangkok, and Seoul as they build a global identity to match their European one.
The through-line from those eleven men who walked out of a gymnastics meeting in 1900 to the club that now holds thirty-five German titles is not a story of smooth ascent. Bayern were excluded from the first Bundesliga, taunted under the Nazis, nearly bankrupt in the 1950s, devastated by injury-time goals in finals they had almost won. The club's motto, Mia San Mia, is Bavarian dialect for 'we are who we are'. It is not a boast. It is a statement of refusal: to be defined by others, to accept a smaller version of themselves, to stay second. Every chapter of this club's history is, in some way, a version of eleven men deciding not to stay in the room where they were being told what they could not do.
The greatest players in the club's history, from Beckenbauer to Müller to Neuer to Kane, have all carried that quality. Beckenbauer, whose number five was retired as a posthumous honour after his death in January 2024, invented the modern sweeper role, turned defence into an attacking art, and captained the club to three consecutive European Cups. Müller scored sixty-eight league goals in a single season and set a record that stood for half a century. Lewandowski broke it. And then Kane arrived and won the Golden Shoe twice in Munich. The records keep being broken by Bayern players, because Bayern keeps finding the player capable of breaking them.
The club that was founded in one evening, that survived persecution and near-bankruptcy and a dozen coaching upheavals, that lost finals in their own stadium and came back the following season to win everything, stands today as the most decorated club in German football history and one of the most decorated in the world. Thirty-five national titles. Six European Cups. A sextuple. And a motto that needs no translation: they are who they are, and who they are is the team that keeps winning.
Image: FC Bayern Munich, Public domain · AI-narrated · Drawn from Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
