Walk into a garden centre in Farmsen-Berne and you will find a Bayern Munich toaster.
You can also buy lighters and ashtrays, or a projector that will beam Bayern’s distinctive logo onto the side of your house at night. You can buy a doormat, too, and water bowls for dogs and cats, all with the same crest.
That would all be fine, but Farmsen-Berne is in Hamburg, and Hamburg is almost as far away as you can get from Bavaria without leaving Germany. It is also home to Hamburger SV, a former European champion currently attracting 57,000 fans in the second division, and St Pauli, newly promoted to the Bundesliga but owner of one of the most distinctive identities in European football.
Who is buying the Bayern toasters? Plenty of people, according to a worker, restocking lightbulbs near the checkout. “But they do it quietly.”
People are drawn to success. This we know. Bayern are the most successful team in German football, with 33 league titles since the Bundesliga era began in 1963. The second-placed club on that list — Nurnberg — only have nine.
In Germany, Bayern’s popularity and reach extend across the entire country. They have 360,000 members — over twice as many as any other German club, except for Borussia Dortmund (200,000).
Bayern Munich fans outside the club’s Allianz Arena (Sebastian Widmann/Getty Images)
The German media’s focus on Bayern lights that path. It is not quite true that they are covered to the exclusion of everyone else — there is variety in respected football magazines Kicker or 11Freunde, for instance.
But early this week, Sky Sport Deutschland was already well into its analysis of the team’s Champions League game against Aston Villa tonight (Wednesday). In Germany’s biggest-selling tabloid, Bild, one of the main stories was about the release of Bayern’s Christmas advent calendar and how, for the first time in as long as anyone can remember, there are no trophies represented on it.
In terms of the attention they garner domestically, Bayern are like a composite of Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea, or Manchester United and Liverpool. They manage to be remarkably popular outside Germany, too.
Bayern say they are, by membership, the biggest sports club in the world. They have 493 official international fan clubs in more than 100 countries — and more than any other club in North America and South America. In 2021, Bayern sold more replica shirts (3.25 million, according to a survey by Euromerica) than any other football team on the planet.
And yet, compared to many European powers, Bayern somehow seem quirky and peculiar. They have always possessed star power, but never with the global wattage of Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, while Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid all operate on bigger budgets and have a modern glint that Bayern do not really possess.
As it turns out, many of Bayern’s differences are a key part of the club’s global appeal.
Late on Sunday morning, autumn sun bathes Munich’s streets. The night before, Bayern had drawn 1-1 with Bayer Leverkusen and on one side of Max-Joseph-Platz, deep in the city’s heart, a bicycle tour is setting off behind its guide.
On the other side of the square, members of a local running club — all wearing red and speaking English — are stretching and singing at the foot of the National Theatre’s steps. On a side street, an ageing violinist scratches at his strings as tourists drift past his scruffy melody.
Munich is different. It’s beautiful and old, but with a distinctive Mediterranean mood, quite unlike the rest of Germany. When Oktoberfest takes over the city each year, those differences are even more pronounced. It’s the largest folk festival in the world, staged in Theresienwiese, to the south west of the city centre. The festival dates back to 1810 and the celebration of a royal wedding held on the same site. Today, it is two weeks of beer, food, music, dancing and tradition, under tents and inside plywood beer halls.
By lunchtime on Sunday, Marienplatz (another landmark city-centre square) is full, barely a cobble free under the old town hall. It’s just a few minutes on the U-Bahn from Theresienwiese, a last stop before getting to the festival itself. Many of the locals are in Bavarian costume. Men in their lederhosen, collarless shirts, waistcoats and knee-length socks. Women in dirndl: a bodice, blouse, and high-waisted skirt.
The scene in Munich’s Marienplatz on Sunday (Seb Stafford-Bloor/The Athletic)
A group of Americans are sitting at benches under a white parasol. One is wearing a vibrant red bowler hat and a pair of dark sunglasses. This is their first Oktoberfest.
“We can only stay for a few days, but people have been friendly and a guy over there,” he says, pointing in the direction of hundreds of people, almost indistinguishable from one another, “explained the outfits and the different things you wear.”
That costume — ‘tracht’ — is part of being a Bayern Munich player, too. It’s one of those quirks that distinguishes the club.
As the author Uli Hesse wrote in Bayern: The Making of a Super Club: “Bayern have always been stoutly and proudly Bavarian. Kurt Landauer (the four-time club president) used to say that the aim of his club was to spread open-minded liberalism and the Bavarian way of life.”
Club legend Thomas Muller enjoys a beer (Photo: S. Mellar/FC Bayern via Getty Images)
Each year, Bayern’s players are true to that, wearing traditional dress to travel to Oktoberfest — or Wiesn (the meadow), as locals refer to it. Each time they do, the photographs are retweeted around the world. This year, new signing Michael Olise added sunglasses to his ensemble and, somehow, made it work.
It’s good fun, but it also helps reinforce that bond between the club and the region. In German, Bayern means Bavaria and the weekend’s game against Leverkusen felt very much like a regional event that went beyond the football. There were lederhosen in the stands and the concourses of the Allianz Arena. Before the game started, a brass band played Star of the South, the club anthem. On the pitch, Bayern dropped their traditional red for a slate-grey Oktoberfest kit, which was on sale in the club shops and online, alongside custom belts, bracelets, and velvet red dirndl.
It’s rare in a modern football world that is image-conscious and uptight, but it seems to allow Bayern to exist as two clubs at once — one typical of today’s environment, one at odds with it.
A brass band is playing Stern des Südens – the Bayern anthem – at pitchside. @archiert1’s pink jacket stealing everyone’s thunder in the foreground. pic.twitter.com/4mA0MGa0Xo
— Seb Stafford-Bloor (@SebSB) September 28, 2024
In 2022-23, Bayern made €419million (£348.6m; $464m) in commercial revenue, more than any other team in Europe. In 2023, they recorded the sixth-highest total revenue in world football (€744m). By any measure, they are a beast of the game. But they keep that company while still being member-run.
Bayern are compliant with German football’s 50+1 rule, which mandates that control of clubs must remain with their members — they must hold 50 per cent of the voting rights, plus one share.
In 2001, Bayern’s football department separated from the original sports club, becoming a PLC for the first time. Audi, Allianz, and Adidas each hold an 8.33 per cent stake in the football club, but the remaining 75 per cent — and control — remains with the members.
In addition, there is a heavy ex-player influence at boardroom level. Uli Hoeness was the long-time business manager and later president (and now honorary president). Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, one of the great centre-forwards in the club’s history, was formerly chief executive and remains on the board. Both remain highly influential figures, even if the day-to-day running is now in the hands of a more contemporary type of executive.
And the supporters are a real presence. A club AGM held in November 2021 descended into chaos over member opposition towards a sponsorship agreement with Qatar Airways. The agreement was due to expire in 2023 and it was not renewed.
Intriguingly, while such bureaucracy feels typically German, it’s one of the many characteristics that seem to appeal to fans from other countries.
Girish is from Chennai, India.
“My first international vacation was to Munich when I was seven,” he tells The Athletic.
“I didn’t know much about football, but after a few years when I started to follow it and came to know about the club, its identity and how it manages to be fan-run and successful really appealed to me, particularly coming from a country with a capitalist mindset like India.
“And I really like the pride Bayern have in being Bavarian, how they stay true to their culture and celebrate festivals like Oktoberfest in traditional dress. It’s unique and cool, so I think it’s an important part of our fandom.”
That resonates, too, with Adam from Seattle.
“I am a little embarrassed to say I became a fan because of the FIFA video games when I was in high school,” he says.
“I come from German heritage, so I gravitated towards those teams and Bayern had just won the Champions League in 2013 while I was in high school. I followed them off and on, but in the past few years, I became way more invested.
“I like that Bavaria has a unique culture that seems to embody the club. And I feel that professional sports in the United States has lost a lot of the tradition it was associated with and that makes following Bayern more interesting.”
The Athletic spoke to other supporters from Nigeria, Vietnam, Pakistan and South Korea, all of whom mentioned a combination of the club’s structure, its playing personality, its roots or financial management as important parts of their fandom, alongside the club’s success in the Bundesliga and Champions League, in explaining their appreciation of Bayern.
Inside Germany, Bayern’s popularity is easy to explain. Success, regionality and breadth of coverage are obvious virtues for a club whose membership has tripled since 2006 and sells its merchandise as far north as a garden centre in Hamburg.
But outside Germany, or Bavaria, Bayern seem to represent a different sweet spot for some fans. A compromise between football’s old-world heritage and its contemporary imperatives, such as size, wealth, and the ability to consistently compete.
That balance appears to be a great strength.
(Photo: Christina Pahnke – sampics/Getty Images)
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