The Toaster in Hamburg
Walk into a garden centre in Farmsen-Berne, a quiet neighborhood in Hamburg — nearly 800 kilometers from Munich, in a city that has its own European champion in Hamburger SV and one of football's most distinctive cult identities in St. Pauli — and you will find a Bayern Munich toaster. Also lighters, ashtrays, a projector that beams the club's crest onto the side of your house at night, doormats, dog bowls, cat bowls, all stamped with the same red-and-white diamond. According to a worker restocking lightbulbs near the checkout, people buy these things in quantities. "But they do it quietly."
That furtiveness tells you everything. FC Bayern München is a €978.3 million annual revenue machine, the largest sports club on Earth by membership — 432,500 dues-paying members as of the 2024/25 annual general meeting — and has been profitable for more than thirty consecutive years, all without a single euro of bank debt on its balance sheet. It has won the Bundesliga 33 times, the DFB-Pokal 20 times, and the Champions League six times, most recently in 2020 behind an Allianz Arena emptied by a pandemic. Its enterprise value hovers near €3 billion. It sells more replica shirts — 3.25 million in 2021, more than any other football club on the planet — than teams backed by sovereign wealth funds and petrostates. And it accomplishes all of this while being majority-owned not by a billionaire or a fund or a royal family, but by fans. Ordinary, dues-paying fans who elect the president, who vote on constitutional amendments, who can — and occasionally do — shout down the executive board at raucous annual general meetings.
The paradox is the thing. Bayern is simultaneously the most passionately supported club in Germany and the most hated. It is the financial hegemon that preaches solidarity, the domestic predator that insists it is a rising tide. It operates like a Fortune 500 company — the former CEO of Adidas runs the supervisory board, the CEO came from BayernLB's boardroom, the three minority shareholders are Allianz, Audi, and Adidas — while structurally belonging to the people who stand in the Südkurve. No oligarchs. No sheiks. No states. No foreign entities as stakeholders. Just a Bavarian club that has, through a century of compounding advantages — some earned, some inherited, many ruthlessly extracted from the weakness of its competitors — built something that looks less like a football team and more like an operating system for converting cultural dominance into perpetual financial advantage.
By the Numbers
The Bayern Machine
€978.3MFC Bayern AG revenue, 2024/25 (record)
€1.017BGroup revenue incl. basketball & eV, 2023/24
€0Bank debt
432,500Dues-paying members (world record)
33Bundesliga titles
6Champions League titles
30+Consecutive years of profitability
€570.5MEquity, June 2024
Eleven Men and a Café
The founding mythology is appropriately German: an act of bureaucratic rebellion that became a world-historical institution. On the evening of February 27, 1900, eleven members of Männerturnverein München 1879 — a gymnastics club, because this was turn-of-the-century Munich, and Turnen, the nationalistic physical fitness movement, still held the cultural high ground over football, that suspicious English import — walked out of a club meeting and into the night. They were from the football division, and they had just been told, again, that competitive matches were unacceptable. Football was for friendlies. The gymnasts were aghast at such competitive instincts.
So the footballers left. Led by Franz John, a photographer from Berlin who had come to Munich and brought with him an outsider's impatience with the local sporting establishment, they convened at Café Gisela, a grand place with white tablecloths and high patterned ceilings on Fürstenstraße. Seventeen men signed the founding charter. Among them were three men of Jewish origin, including Gustav Manning, who had founded the football club in Freiburg as a medical student and attended the founding meeting of the DFB — the German Football Association itself, also established in 1900 — as a representative of the South German Football Association. The original club colours were blue and white, the colours of Bavaria. It would take sixty-eight years before the club would settle on the red we now associate with them.
Café Gisela is long gone. Much of Munich was damaged during the Second World War. Many of the street names changed. But on the spot where Gisela stood, there is now a bronze plaque mounted on a marble obelisk, bearing the Bayern crest and the club's founding document. The plaque exists because the club fought to preserve its origin story — the same origin story that was nearly erased during the twelve years when that origin's Jewish threads made it dangerous.
The Shadow and the Light
Bayern's Jewish heritage is not incidental decoration. It is foundational — and the club's relationship to it during the Nazi era is neither the simple victim narrative sometimes deployed nor the clean-hands story the club long preferred. The Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, commissioned by Bayern in 2017 to conduct the first comprehensive study of a German football club under National Socialism, analyzed approximately 15,000 file scans from nearly 60 archives across Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, France, Israel, and the United States. The findings, published in a doctoral thesis by Gregor Hofmann, revealed that between 1933 and 1945, more than half of the officials in the FC Bayern club management were members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
Bayern was no different from other clubs in this respect. But the study also found that FC Bayern held onto its Jewish members longer — publicly — than many rivals. Club president Kurt Landauer, a Jewish businessman who had led Bayern's rise through the 1920s, was interned at Dachau for 33 days in 1938 before fleeing into exile in Switzerland in 1939. The club's membership collapsed. Its teams disintegrated. It fell to 81st place in the German Reich football ranking. In July 1944, an Allied bombing raid destroyed the club office. And yet, according to club records, on April 23, 1945 — days before the war ended — the team beat 1860 Munich 3-2.
Hard struggles for honour and victory, rapturous applause and unfulfilled hopes all were steps along the long road to the lofty heights where FC Bayern today finds itself.
Landauer returned from exile in 1947 and was again voted club president. Reconstruction began. But the Landauer chapter also contains a quiet lesson about Bayern's DNA: the club's openness to outsiders — foreign coaches, Jewish members, players from across Europe — was unusual in early twentieth-century German football, and it was precisely this cosmopolitanism that made it vulnerable under fascism. Bayern's identity has always been defined by this tension: deeply Bavarian, stubbornly international. Mia san mia — we are who we are — but who "we" are has never been static.
The Snub That Built an Empire
The moment that set Bayern's modern trajectory was, paradoxically, a humiliation. In 1963, when the DFB launched the Bundesliga — Germany's first professional national league — they chose which clubs from the five regional Oberliga divisions would be invited. Munich could only have one representative. The DFB chose 1860 Munich, which had won the final Oberliga Süd, over Bayern. Club president Wilhelm Neudecker considered it an outrageous injustice.
It turned out to be a stroke of luck. Excluded from the inaugural Bundesliga, Bayern were forced into a lower division — and freed from the complacency of guaranteed top-flight status. The precarious state of the club's finances created urgency. The youth academy, which had already developed over 200 young players by 1914 before the First World War destroyed it, was rebuilt with ferocious discipline. And into this cauldron of wounded pride and institutional hunger walked a thirteen-year-old boy named Franz Beckenbauer.
Beckenbauer grew up supporting 1860. He was on the verge of joining them when, playing in a U14 match against his prospective employers, an opposition player slapped him across the face. The boy who would become Der Kaiser — the greatest defender in German football history, and arguably the most consequential figure in its administration — changed his mind on the spot. He joined Bayern's U19s in 1964. His friends followed. The football world was never the same.
⏳
From Expulsion to Empire
The arc from Bundesliga exclusion to continental domination
1963DFB excludes Bayern from inaugural Bundesliga; 1860 Munich chosen instead.
1965Bayern earn promotion to Bundesliga for the 1965–66 season.
1967Win the European Cup Winners' Cup — first continental trophy.
1969First Bundesliga title, four years after promotion.
1972Move into the Olympic Stadium; beat Borussia Dortmund 11–1 in the Bundesliga.
1974First of three consecutive European Cups — the last club ever to achieve it.
By the end of the 1960s, Bayern's squad contained three of the greatest German footballers who ever lived: Beckenbauer in defence, Gerd Müller in attack — the Bundesliga's all-time leading scorer, a distinction he still holds — and Sepp Maier in goal. Müller was the league's top scorer for seven seasons. With Uli Hoeneß and Paul Breitner providing support, the trophies accumulated at a pace that turned the 1963 snub into something like the club's founding myth rewritten in gold: excluded, underestimated, and then utterly, relentlessly dominant.
The Man Who Made It a Business
Professional football clubs in the 1970s were not businesses. They were associations with spreadsheets. When Uli Hoeneß, a knee injury having ended his playing career at the absurd age of 27, took over as Bayern's general manager on May 1, 1979, the club employed twenty people. Average attendance at the Olympic Stadium was 35,000. Games weren't always on television. Revenue was 85% dependent on matchday receipts.
Hoeneß was a force of nature in the way that founders of consequential institutions tend to be: visionary about the destination, ferocious about the details, impossible to work with and impossible to replace. Born in Ulm in 1952, he had been Beckenbauer's teammate during the golden era, a forward with more intelligence than pace. His mentor was Robert Schwan, Bayern's long-time business manager, who recognized in the young Hoeneß a capacity for the commercial side of football that bordered on obsession. "As a player, he already considered me his 'Mini-Manager,'" Hoeneß recalled. "When we were in South America and there were hotel bills to settle or flight transfers, he'd always take me."
I was always of the opinion that Bayern Munich could develop from a small club to a world brand.
His approach was empirical and omnivorous. He looked to the United States. In San Francisco, visiting a 49ers team store, he watched bankers and business people — not classic fans — shopping for their children on a Monday morning, and he realized that merchandise could be a revenue line, not a novelty. He returned to Munich and built a fan shop. He fought for pay-TV rights when German football was still financed largely by gate receipts, founding an interest group with Gerhard Mayer-Vorfelder, the president of VfB Stuttgart, called "Action 50 Million" — the amount, in marks, they wanted from television. They got 20 million marks. They were laughed at. Then the rights markets exploded.
Under Hoeneß, Bayern's revenue grew from roughly €20 million to €700 million. The staff went from 20 to 1,000. The audience dependency that had defined German club economics — 85% of revenue from the gate — inverted: by the time Hoeneß stepped back, matchday was less than 20% of the total. What replaced it was commercial income — sponsorship, licensing, merchandising — built on the foundation of a brand that Hoeneß had meticulously constructed. He understood, decades before the terminology existed, that a football club's attention was undermonetized. Every eyeball that watched a Bayern match could be converted into a commercial relationship. The question was how.
The Cathedral at Fröttmaning
The answer, or a very large part of it, was the Allianz Arena. And the story of how it got built reveals the operating principles — political shrewdness, structural partnerships, willingness to share risk while retaining control — that define Bayern's institutional DNA.
By the late 1990s, the Olympic Stadium, built for the 1972 Games, was inadequate. Beckenbauer, then chairman of Bayern's supervisory board, put it plainly: "Watching football should be fun and a great experience for everyone." But Munich's city government wanted to redevelop the existing stadium, not build a new one. Years of debate followed. Then, in January 2001, Bayern formed an unlikely alliance with local rivals 1860 Munich — both clubs would move into a new stadium together, splitting the costs. A citizens' referendum on October 21, 2001, produced an overwhelming 65.8% majority in favour. Turnout of 37.5% was the highest ever for a referendum in Bavaria.
The design competition attracted elite architects from around the world. The winners: Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the Swiss architects who would later design the Bird's Nest in Beijing. Their concept was audacious — more than 2,500 diamond-shaped ETFE panels on the exterior, capable of being illuminated in different colours. It was the world's first stadium with a completely colour-changing exterior. When Bayern play, it glows red. For international matches, white. On the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, orange.
Bayern and 1860 each took a 50% stake in the construction company, München Stadion GmbH. The financing was secured in part by a transaction that would prove even more consequential than the stadium itself: in 2002, Herbert Hainer, then CEO of Adidas, arranged for Adidas to purchase a 10% stake in FC Bayern München AG. This made Adidas the first shareholder of the record champions and created the financial foundation for the arena's construction. Allianz AG — the insurance giant — paid approximately €6 million per year for naming rights. Audi later acquired another 8.33% stake. Allianz itself bought 8.33%.
The total cost of the Allianz Arena, which opened on May 30, 2005, and holds 75,000 spectators, was approximately €340 million. Bayern paid off the stadium debt — originally projected to take thirty years — in 2014, fully fifteen years ahead of schedule. By 2018, 1860 Munich had gone bankrupt and Bayern bought out their 50% share of the stadium company.
The lesson embedded in every beam of the Allianz Arena: Bayern builds permanent infrastructure by distributing risk among long-term corporate partners who have a financial stake in the club's success, then concentrates ownership once the asset is proven. Adidas didn't just sponsor the jersey. It owned a piece of the club. The incentives aligned.
The 50+1 Rule and the Architecture of Control
Understanding Bayern requires understanding the 50+1 rule, a regulation introduced in Germany in the 1990s to prevent clubs from bankruptcy and protect against shortsighted investors. The rule stipulates that each club's member association must own more than 50% of the voting shares in the company that operates the football team. No outside entity — no Sheikh Mansour, no Todd Boehly, no Qatari Sports Investment — can seize controlling interest.
Bayern's corporate structure is a masterwork of compliance and leverage. FC Bayern München eV — the registered association, the Verein, the entity that any fan can join for approximately €60 per year — owns 75% of FC Bayern München AG, the stock corporation that runs the football operations. The remaining 25% is divided equally: 8.33% each to Adidas, Audi, and Allianz. All three are German conglomerates, all three are headquartered in Bavaria or have deep Bavarian roots, and all three are simultaneously sponsors and shareholders.
The club's constitution stipulates that members must hold at least a 70% stake — leaving, in theory, a 5% float that could be sold to an additional partner. In 2025, according to the Financial Times, Bayern held talks with EQT, the Swedish private equity firm, about selling a minority stake. Negotiations collapsed when Bayern's CFO Michael Diederich — EQT's primary contact at the club — left to become co-head of Deutsche Bank's corporate banking business. It is unclear whether the talks will resume. What is clear is that the structural ceiling — the 50+1 rule, the constitutional requirement — constrains the club's capital-raising options in ways that both protect its soul and limit its firepower relative to state-backed rivals.
The beauty of the model is also its vulnerability. Bayern's financial success has been extraordinary precisely because the ownership structure forces discipline. No owner can raid the treasury for a vanity signing. No private equity firm can lever up the balance sheet. Profitability is not optional — it is constitutional. But this same discipline means that when Real Madrid spends €1 billion rebuilding the Bernabéu, or Manchester City adds £100 million players as though selecting from a catalogue, Bayern must finance its ambitions from operating cash flow and the patient cultivation of commercial relationships. The gap is manageable when you're winning. When you stop winning, the gap becomes existential.
FC Hollywood and the Paradox of Personality
The 1990s were when Bayern became a soap opera. The era of "FC Hollywood" — a nickname bestowed by the German press — saw the club's outsized personalities generate as many tabloid headlines as trophies. Lothar Matthäus, the combative midfielder who remains the most-capped German international, feuded publicly with teammates. Oliver Kahn, the volcanic goalkeeper, projected an intensity that terrified opponents and exhausted allies. Jürgen Klinsmann arrived, clashed with the establishment, departed. The coaching carousel spun: Erich Ribbeck, Otto Rehhagel, Giovanni Trapattoni, each lasting barely a season, each leaving behind a trail of leaked dressing-room arguments and Bild front pages.
And through it all, Bayern kept winning. They lifted the UEFA Cup in 1996, beating Bordeaux in the final. They won Bundesliga title after Bundesliga title. The paradox of FC Hollywood was that the chaos was itself a brand — generating attention, conversation, cultural relevance — while the underlying institutional machinery kept producing results. Hoeneß, by then president, understood this instinctively. He was himself a creature of tabloid drama, pugnacious in press conferences, willing to fight publicly with anyone, capable of breathtaking candour one moment and strategic obfuscation the next. The club's personality was his personality: unfiltered, polarizing, relentlessly productive.
The Champions League, though, remained elusive through this period — agonizingly so. In 1999, Bayern were seconds from winning the trophy when Manchester United scored twice in injury time. In 2001, they finally broke through, beating Valencia on penalties after a gruelling final, with Kahn saving three spot kicks. The two-year gap between 1999 and 2001 — between the cruelest possible defeat and the ultimate vindication — compressed into a single institutional scar and its resolution. Bayern supporters never forgot the pain of 1999. They turned it into fuel.
The Guardiola Experiment and the Search for Perfection
When Pep Guardiola arrived in Munich in the summer of 2013, he inherited a team that had just completed the first treble in German football history — Bundesliga, DFB-Pokal, and Champions League — under Jupp Heynckes, a coach who had been at the club so many times he was practically furniture. The decision to replace a treble-winning manager with the most coveted coach in world football was, by any conventional measure, insane. It was also entirely consistent with Bayern's deepest institutional instinct: the conviction that present excellence is the enemy of future dominance.
Guardiola — the former Barcelona mastermind who had transformed Spanish football through positional play and tiki-taka, the man who had taken a sabbatical year in New York before choosing Bayern over every other club on the planet — was recruited in conditions of extraordinary secrecy. As journalist Martí Perarnau documented in
Pep Confidential, Guardiola was given access to every level of the organization and in return gave Perarnau access to the inner workings of his first season. "Write about everything you see. Be as critical as you like," Guardiola told Perarnau.
What Guardiola found was an organization that already operated at an elite level and a squad that included the backbone of the German team that would win the 2014 World Cup: Manuel Neuer, Philipp Lahm, Thomas Müller, Bastian Schweinsteiger. What he brought was obsessive tactical reinvention — reprogramming the way players thought about space, timing, structure. Bayern smashed domestic records, winning the Bundesliga with seven games to spare. But the Champions League — the prize Guardiola had been hired to win, the prize that would distinguish this era from mere domestic monopoly — eluded him all three seasons, including a humiliating 2014 semi-final loss to Real Madrid.
I would give up all other titles in order to win the Champions League with Bayern.
Guardiola's Bayern tenure is now seen as a hinge point — the moment the club committed to a philosophy of total football sophistication, even at the cost of immediate Champions League glory. The players he trained went on to form the core of Germany's World Cup-winning team. The tactical framework he installed — the emphasis on positional play, the insistence on building from the back through Neuer's sweeper-keeper role — fundamentally changed how Bayern played and, eventually, how Germany played. Six of the seven national team members who won the 2014 World Cup final were Bayern players.
The Revenue Machine and its Fuel
Bayern's financial model is distinctive among European football's elite not for its complexity but for its discipline. The club generates revenue through three principal channels: commercial income (sponsorship, merchandising, and licensing), broadcasting rights, and matchday revenue. In the 2023/24 financial year, the breakdown was roughly:
FC Bayern München AG, FY 2023/24
| Revenue Stream | FY 2023/24 | Notes |
|---|
| Sponsorship & Marketing | €225.7M | Adidas, Allianz, Audi, Deutsche Telekom, etc. |
| Matchday Revenue | €226.9M | Includes all competitions & friendlies |
| Transfer Income | €186.1M | Record high; key contributor to EBT growth |
| Merchandising | €135.1M | FC Bayern World flagship, global e-commerce |
| Media Rights | €91.7M | €90.9M from Bundesliga centralized distribution |
| Other Revenue |
What leaps out is the primacy of commercial income — sponsorship, marketing, and merchandising together accounted for over €360 million, or roughly 47% of recurring revenue excluding transfers. This is Hoeneß's legacy in numerical form: the deliberate, decades-long shift from gate-dependence to commercial diversification. Bayern acquired a block of prime real estate in central Munich and built FC Bayern World, a flagship retail and experience destination. The jersey alone generates close to €130 million annually. International merchandising, with 493 official fan clubs in over 100 countries, operates at a scale that most clubs' marketing departments dream about.
Broadcasting is, by contrast, Bayern's structural disadvantage. The Bundesliga's centralized TV rights distribution generated only €90.9 million for Bayern in 2023/24 — a fraction of what top Premier League clubs earn. Bayern generates more than 30% of the Bundesliga's international reach, according to CEO Jan-Christian Dreesen, but receives "significantly less than half of that in distributions." The solidarity principle that defines German football's revenue sharing model — a philosophical commitment to competitive balance that the 50+1 rule embodies — simultaneously sustains the league ecosystem and caps Bayern's broadcast upside.
FC Bayern is not the problem — we are part of the solution! Through our success domestically and especially internationally, we are the driving force of the Bundesliga. We generate more than 30% of the Bundesliga's reach abroad, but receive significantly less than half of that in distributions.
The result: Bayern's total revenue of €951.5 million in 2023/24 placed it behind Real Madrid (the first club to break €1 billion), Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, and Manchester United in the Deloitte Football Money League. The gap is not talent — Bayern's squad is consistently ranked among the top five in the world — but infrastructure. Specifically, the broadcast infrastructure of the Premier League, which distributes roughly three to four times more per club than the Bundesliga does. Bayern wins despite this structural deficit, not because of it.
The Kane Gambit and the Transfer Philosophy
On August 12, 2023, Bayern paid approximately €100 million to Tottenham Hotspur for Harry Kane — the most expensive transfer in the club's history, and a departure from the patient, domestically-focused acquisition strategy that had defined the Hoeneß era. Traditionally, Bayern operated as the buyer of last resort for German talent: if a player was a star in the Bundesliga, he would eventually end up in Munich. Robert Lewandowski came from Borussia Dortmund. Manuel Neuer came from Schalke. Leon Goretzka came from Schalke. Mats Hummels came from Dortmund, went back, came again. The pipeline was so reliable — and so controversial — that rival clubs accused Bayern of systematically weakening the domestic competition.
The Kane signing signaled a strategic evolution. At 30, Kane was neither a young development bet nor a German domestic hoover play. He was a marquee international star, acquired for the global attention premium that his name carried, for the goal-scoring output that his record guaranteed, and for the commercial value of having England's captain wearing a Bayern jersey in Asia, North America, and the Middle East — the growth markets where the Bundesliga's brand deficit is most acute.
Bayern's transfer philosophy has always been two-sided: buy domestically to maintain competitive advantage, sell globally to generate liquidity. In 2023/24, transfer income reached a record €186.1 million, the highest in the club's history, and a pivotal contributor to the €62.7 million pre-tax profit. The philosophy — buy young, develop, sell high — coexists with strategic marquee acquisitions like Kane and Michael Olise, the exciting French-English winger signed from Crystal Palace in the summer of 2024. The tension between frugality and ambition, between the Hoeneß-era parsimony and the Guardiola-era expectation of world-class talent at every position, defines the current era.
Alphonso Davies — the Canadian left-back signed from Vancouver Whitecaps in January 2019 for approximately €10 million, who became a key figure in the 2020 Champions League triumph — is the model: young, relatively cheap, developed at Bayern, and then, when Real Madrid and Premier League clubs came circling as his contract expired in 2025, re-signed on a four-and-a-half-year deal through 2030. The club retained its asset, avoided a free transfer, and reinforced the message that Bayern is a destination, not a waypoint.
The Kompany Surprise and the Coaching Paradox
One of the most striking observations in Uli Hesse's
Bayern: Creating a Global Superclub is the relatively small impact that individual managers have had on Bayern's historical development compared to players and administrators. No one considers Dettmar Cramer — a two-time European Cup winner with Bayern — in the same category as Brian Clough, Alex Ferguson, or Arrigo Sacchi. The institution is bigger than the manager. The institution endures; the manager serves.
This creates a paradox: Bayern attracts world-class coaches because of its squad and resources, then burns through them at a rate that would alarm any other organization. Vincent Kompany — appointed in the summer of 2024 — was the club's fifth head coach in six years. His predecessor Thomas Tuchel lasted barely a season and a half. Julian Nagelsmann, the prodigy who arrived from RB Leipzig in 2021, was sacked in March 2023 despite an impressive win rate. Hansi Flick, who won the treble in 2020, lasted two full seasons. The coaching graveyard is littered with talent.
Kompany's appointment was, by the standards of Bayern's coaching carousel, the most counterintuitive choice in recent memory. The former Belgian international had just led Burnley to relegation from the Premier League. He had no experience managing a club of Bayern's scale. The decision to hire him — reportedly on the recommendation of Guardiola, his former manager at Manchester City — was a bet on intelligence over experience, on tactical vision over proven track record. It was also, frankly, the result of a chaotic search process: Bayern had spoken to Xabi Alonso and Ralf Rangnick, unsuccessfully approached Oliver Glasner, and even considered bringing back Flick or Nagelsmann before landing on Kompany, paying Burnley €12 million in compensation.
The gamble worked. Kompany led Bayern back to the top of the Bundesliga in his first season, won the Franz Beckenbauer Supercup, and set records at the start of the 2025/26 campaign. His coaching record through 72 games — 54 wins, 9 draws, 9 losses — was outstanding. The institution, once again, had selected the right human to execute the system.
Mia San Mia
Thomas Müller was born in Bavaria, grew up a Bayern fan, and joined the club when he was ten years old. In September 2024, in a match against Freiburg, he made his 710th appearance for the club — the most by any player in its 125-year history. "My childhood was red, right from the beginning," he told The Athletic at the club's Säbener Straße headquarters. "My grandfather was a big Bayern fan. I never met him because he died before I was born, but I think he was the founder of the fan community in my family."
Müller is what the club sees when it looks in the mirror. Not the most gifted player in any technical dimension — not the fastest, not the strongest, not possessed of Beckenbauer's revolutionary elegance or Gerd Müller's lethal instinct — but the most Bayern player imaginable. His positional intelligence is so unusual that it defies scouting categories. His understanding of space, of when to arrive and when to vacate, operates at a level that statistical models struggle to capture. He has been the subject of a Harvard Business School case study — "Thomas Müller: Mr. Bayern Munich" — that examines his skills as transferable analytical competencies.
Mia san mia — "we are who we are" in colloquial Bavarian — is the club's official motto. It originally stems from the Austrian army and supposedly signifies superiority and confidence. But it also means something darker and more specific: we will not apologize for winning. We will not pretend to be smaller than we are. We will take the envy and the jealousy — because they come from other people's inability to build what we have built. As Oliver Kahn, the former goalkeeper turned briefly CEO, once said: "It also means to carry the envy and jealousy of half a country on your shoulders."
The 2024/25 season, Bayern's 125th anniversary year, ended with the club registering record revenue of €978.3 million — another high-water mark — and a global membership of 432,500, surpassing the previous year's figure of 382,000 by a staggering 50,000 new members. Pre-tax profit fell from €62.7 million to €42.5 million, reflecting increased investment, but the operating profit (EBITDA) rose 11.3% to €187.8 million. Herbert Hainer was re-elected as club president. The Bundesliga title returned to Munich.
In the garden centres of Hamburg, the toasters keep selling. Quietly.
