Tomorrow (Wednesday) will be the 10th anniversary of the official opening of the FC Bayern Museum at the Allianz Arena. It’s regarded as both a place of historical memory and the beating heart of FC Bayern Munich. “The FC Bayern Museum is a fundamental part of our club life: the pulse of time beats here, because it documents the unique history of the club and keeps it alive at the same time,” said president Herbert Hainer. “The last 10 years have challenged us and demanded a lot, but more than that they’ve brought us further and enabled us to grow,” said Petra Leufstedt, director of the FC Bayern Museum.
Developments, milestones, facts, figures and curiosities
- With numbers growing continually to over 350,000 visitors a year, the FC Bayern Museum was in the ‘Top Five’ of Munich museums for 2019 - the last full calendar year before the coronavirus pandemic.
- In total, over 2.6 million people have visited the FC Bayern Museum in the last 10 years.
- Since opening, the number of exhibits has grown from around 3,000 to around 7,500. The FC Bayern archive’s inventory has thus more than doubled.
- Nearly seven hours of exclusive film material have been produced for the Museum to date.
- The team at the FC Bayern Museum have come up with 20 special exhibitions in 10 years. The special exhibition “Mr FC Bayern - Uli Hoeneß, The Man” about the life and works of honorary president Uli Hoeneß is currently on display.
- The touring exhibition “Venerated - Persecuted - Forgotten” has toured more than 45 locations in Germany and abroad to date. It addresses club members who had to flee or were deported during the Nazi era for religious or political reasons.
- The FC Bayern Munich Hall of Fame comprised 16 players in 2012. Philipp Lahm and Bastian Schweinsteiger have since been added to it.
- To date, more than 265 first-team players and coaching staff have been reproduced in life-size on aluminium plates and put on display since the museum opened. The team from the past 2021/22 season is currently on display until the squad for the coming season has been photographed and the figures have been made.
- To mark 50 years of the women’s football department, the FC Bayern Museum dedicated an exhibition area to the history of women’s football at FC Bayern in 2021.
- Since the opening of the Museum, the FC Bayern men’s team have won a total of 27 honours.
- The FC Bayern Museum appears to bring luck. After opening, FC Bayern have won the Bundesliga title in every season since 2013.
- Although Bayern have been crowned German champions 32 times, there are only 31 Meisterschale trophies on display. For the first title in 1932, the old Viktoria trophy was borrowed. The mass of trophies is nevertheless impressive: if all 31 were stacked together, they would form a tower more than three metres high.
- The Museum features not only replicas but also original trophies. One of them is the trophy for the 1976 European Cup. Until 2008, UEFA had a rule that a club could keep the original if it won the competition three times in a row, as Bayern did from 1974 to 1976.
- Around 400 different donors have enriched the permanent exhibition and the archive with their exhibits.
- The German Design Council awarded the FC Bayern Museum the German Design Award in the main category “Excellent Architecture” in 2020.
The anniversary celebrations with reduced admission for full-paying visitors, special tours through the museum (11 and 14:00 CEST) as well as highlight tours of the Allianz Arena (12 and 15:00 CEST) take place on Thursday 26 May.
More information on that here:
