Bayern Munich is the most successful football club in Germany. It has won the national championship title 33 times and the DFB Cup 20 times. To these we must add six victories in the Champions League and the European Champions Cup, as the tournament was called until 1992, one each in the Cup Winners' Cup and the UEFA Cup, as the Europa League was previously known. The Bavarian giants have also won two World Cups and two FIFA Club World Championships. And these are just the most important titles and trophies that the club has in its showcase in Munich.
The history of FC Bayern begins 125 years ago. On February 27, 1900, a group of young men met in the "Gisela" café near the Hofgarten in the center of Munich. They were all members of the football section of the Munich men's gymnastics club MTV. At that time, football was ridiculed by the more conservative gymnasts as a new-fangled sport coming from England.
After the gymnastics club refused to officially register its football section with the association, the MTV footballers founded their own football club and called it F.C. Bayern. Initially, the club's colors were blue and white - just like the colors of the Bavarian flag.
Kurt Landauer - football visionary in the "Jewish club"
The first successes were not long in coming. In 1924, Bayern won the South German championship for the first time, and in 1932 and its first German championship title. Shortly after, the National Socialists came to power and in their eyes FC Bayern was hated as a "Jewish club".
Kurt Landauer, a Jew, had been the club's president since 1919 and was responsible for its sporting rise during the Weimar Republic. He emphasized good work with the youth, organized test matches against teams from other countries and attracted foreign players to Munich - including Jews - from, for example, the Czech Republic or Hungary.
In 1933, Landauer was forced to retire and was later sent briefly to the Dachau concentration camp. After his release in 1939, he fled to Switzerland, where he managed to survive World War II, while many of his family members became victims of the Holocaust. Landauer was re-elected as president of FC Bayern and remained in this position for 4 years - from 1947 to 1951. In 2013, Kurt Landauer was named honorary president of FC Bayern.
The Golden Generation: Beckenbauer, Meyer, Müller
However, in terms of sports, things did not initially go well after the war. For a while, FC Bayern was only in the second tier and therefore did not participate in the creation of the Bundesliga in 1963.
Two years later, in 1965, the Bavarians reached the Bundesliga. At that time, an exceptional young talent named Franz Beckenbauer was already playing in the team's defense, Sepp Meyer was in goal, and the goals were scored by "the bomb" Gerd Müller.
In the following years, the team that won its first Bundesliga title in 1969 and three consecutive national championships from 1974 to 1976 was built around these three big stars.
"We had a team that was capable of winning everything. Gerd Müller was our top scorer and Sepp Meyer was our support. It was a very special time," says Bavarian icon Franz Beckenbauer, who died in January 2024, about that team.
Great successes under manager Uli Höhne
The next phase of total domination came in 1983 under coaches Udo Latek and Jupp Heynckes. But the main credit for the club's sporting successes over all these years goes to former team player Uli Hoeness, who ended his career due to injury in 1979 and became manager of FC Bayern.
In a short time, he transformed the then indebted club into one of the most solvent and best clubs in the world. "Our innovative strength has always set standards. For example, Uli Hoeness is the man who practically invented merchandising in football", says the current club president Herbert Hainer.
One of Hoeness' favorite strategies is to attract the best players from the Bavarians' rivals to Munich with the promise that they will win titles. In this way, he strengthens his own team and at the same time weakens his opponents.
Absolute hegemon in the Bundesliga
In 1987 Bayern overtake 1. FC Nürnberg to win their tenth German championship, a title the Bavarians have since added to 23 more. From 2013 to 2023, they were the undisputed champions of Germany – winning 11 titles in a row. This streak was broken last year when Bayer Leverkusen became champions.
This season, FC Bayern are back on top - in the provisional standings they lead by as much as 8 points over the second (Bayer Leverkusen) and it is very likely that the Bavarians will win their record 34th title.
Battle for a place on the international stage
However, Germany has long been a narrow place for Bayern, which has offices in New York, Shanghai and Bangkok. The German championship is an obvious goal every year, as is the Football Association Cup. But even more important than the national titles are the Champions League and the comparison with the other leading European clubs.
In recent years, however, FC Bayern has somewhat lagged behind in this competition: clubs such as Real Madrid and Manchester City have significantly larger budgets, which allows them to pay higher salaries. This makes it increasingly difficult for Bayern Munich to attract the best players in the world.
"England spends astronomical amounts of money in an unreasonable, irrational way", former Bayern CEO Karl-Heinz Rummenigge told the Italian "Corriere dello Sport" two years ago.
The globalisation of the market has created incredible inequality
In the German football championship, however, a similar imbalance is observed in favour of FC Bayern - although the differences are not so drastic. FC Bayern has the most money, the best players and has for years benefited the most from the distribution of television rights revenue due to its long-standing success.
In this respect, the gap between the Munich club and the other participants in the Bundesliga is growing wider. That is why, probably, on its 150th birthday, FC Bayern will still be the undisputed number one in German football, and its dominance will probably be even greater than today.