World champions among members' Schafkopf tournament with president Herbert Hainer

A good three and a half hours of socialising at the Schafkopf card table - and all in the spirit of FC Bayern in the third edition of the members' Schafkopf tournament. Together with president Herbert Hainer, vice-president Professor Dr Dieter Mayer, World Cup-winning club legends Klaus Augenthaler and Raimond Aumann, Jürgen Muth (Allianz Arena managing director), and long-time head of FC Bayern Women Karin Danner, there were 42 members sat around the tables having been drawn by lot from over 500 registrations. Although the six-strong FCB delegation weren’t in the running for the prize, Auge did joke that he had come to the *1900 clubhouse at the FC Bayern Campus “because I need a bit of money”.

Before things got underway, Hainer addressed the group with an appeal. “We organise this event not only because we love playing cards at FC Bayern, but also because we want to bring our members together regularly to exchange ideas, so that we know what moves them and what's on their minds, so that we can do things better. It's important to us to be in dialogue with our members, and in Bavaria it's a wonderful tradition to talk about everything that's on your mind at the card table,” he said. “So don't be afraid to talk about things. Because that's what this evening is for. And now I wish everyone a good hand and a high score.”

From regular members' tables in Munich, Cologne, Salzburg and Leipzig to workshops on a wide variety of topics relating to club life, quiz evenings and darts tournaments to card games, the club's diverse dialogue formats have been developed and established by the team around FC Bayern managing director Benny Folkmann in recent years. No distance is too far for the members to travel to take part. Jürgen Kunkel and Uwe Reubelt, for example, drove over 340 kilometres especially for the evening at the clubhouse, and Werner Brandl travelled all the way from Switzerland. Helmut Schmidhuber, member number 15 and a member of the club since May 1954, who sat at the table with the president at the start, also received a special round of applause.

After the first round, Hainer said that he learnt to play Schafkopf at the age of six or seven: “My grandparents had a pub next to my parents’ butcher's shop, and that's where my grandma taught me to play cards.” In the end, Bernhard Förg secured first place and received an FCB jacket from the current members' collection. He was followed by Franz Ailer and Ulrich Czarnitzki, who won a sweatshirt and a beer glass from the FCB members' collection respectively. Vice-president Mayer bid farewell to the players saying, “Many thanks on behalf of the executive committee and Herbert Hainer, Walter Mennekes and myself.” Even if some individuals had a bad hand, of course, there was “a good atmosphere at all the tables”, he summarised, adding with a smile: “Always remember: bad luck in the game, good luck in love! With this in mind, I wish everyone a safe journey home.”

Herbert Hainer recently gave a keynote speech at the Zonta women's movement: