Football is the national sport of Germany: it has no legal title, but it is the country’s most-played and most-watched game by a wide margin. The German Football Association (DFB), founded in Leipzig in 1900, has more than 8 million members in 23,713 clubs, which makes it the largest single sports federation in the world, and the men’s team has won four World Cups (1954, 1974, 1990 and 2014) and the women’s team two (2003 and 2007). The game is rooted in particular places: Braunschweig, where the first matches were organised in 1874; Dortmund, whose Westfalenstadion is the largest stadium in the country; Gelsenkirchen and the Ruhr; Munich; and Berlin’s Olympiastadion. Handball, winter sports and motor racing follow behind, each with its own heartland.
Braunschweig and Leipzig: Where German Football Began
The game entered Germany through a school. In 1874 Konrad Koch, a teacher of Latin, Greek and geography at the Martino-Katharineum in Braunschweig, organised with his colleague August Hermann what is usually described as the first football match in Germany, between their own pupils. Koch published the first German rule book in 1875, though his version still looked a lot like rugby, and the game spread to schools in Hanover, Bremen, Hamburg and Göttingen in the late 1870s. Other sources point to earlier games among English residents in Dresden, so Braunschweig’s claim is to the first organised German game rather than the first ball ever kicked.
Gymnastics was the established sport at the time. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn had opened the first open-air Turnplatz at the Hasenheide in Berlin in 1811, and Jahn’s Turner clubs were the model for the German sports club. Football clubs multiplied alongside them, and on 28 January 1900 representatives of 86 clubs met in Leipzig and voted 62 to 22 to found the Deutscher Fußball-Bund. The DFB organised the first national championship in 1902–03, joined FIFA by telegram in 1904 and sent out its first national team in 1908. Today its headquarters are in Frankfurt am Main, and its structure mirrors German federalism: the German Football League (DFL) runs the professional Bundesliga and 2. Bundesliga, while five regional and 21 state associations organise the semi-professional and amateur levels below, down to village sides that play on Sunday mornings.
The Ruhr: Dortmund’s Yellow Wall and the Gelsenkirchen Derby
The industrial Ruhr, a chain of former coal and steel towns in North Rhine-Westphalia, is where German football feels most like a way of life. The Bundesliga itself was founded in Dortmund in 1962, with the first season in 1963–64, and Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion, called Signal Iduna Park for sponsorship reasons, is the biggest ground in Germany. It holds 81,365 for league matches with standing areas and 65,829 in all-seater mode for European games.
Its south stand, the Südtribüne, holds 24,454 standing supporters, the largest terrace in European football, and is known as the Gelbe Wand, the Yellow Wall. In 2011–12 Borussia Dortmund averaged 80,588 spectators per game, a European record, and the stadium hosted matches at the 1974 and 2006 World Cups and the 2001 UEFA Cup final.
A short way west along the Ruhr conurbation lies Gelsenkirchen, home of FC Schalke 04, founded in 1904 in the Schalke district. Schalke’s great era was the 1930s and 1940s, but it still had about 210,000 members in 2025, the third-largest football club in Germany. It returned to the Bundesliga for 2026–27 after promotion from the second division. Since 2001 Schalke has played at the Arena AufSchalke, now the Veltins-Arena, which has a retractable roof, a pitch that slides out of the building and a league capacity of 62,271. It staged the 2004 Champions League final and five matches at the 2006 World Cup.
When the two clubs meet, the game is the Revierderby, named after the Revier, a shortening of Bergbaurevier, or mining district. It is widely considered the greatest rivalry in German football. Smaller Ruhr clubs such as VfL Bochum, MSV Duisburg and Rot-Weiss Essen play what locals call the kleines Revierderby, the minor derby. Across Germany, the Bundesliga averaged 38,657 spectators per game in 2024–25, the second-highest average of any football league in the world.
Munich: The 1974 Final and Bayern’s Allianz Arena
Bavaria’s capital is the seat of German club football’s dominant force. Bayern Munich have won 34 of the 63 Bundesliga titles, including 11 in a row from 2013 to 2023; the other champions include Borussia Dortmund, Hamburger SV, Werder Bremen, Bayer Leverkusen, Borussia Mönchengladbach and VfB Stuttgart. Bundesliga clubs as a whole have won eight European Cup or Champions League titles. For more than three decades Bayern played at the Olympiastadion built for the 1972 Summer Olympics, and it was there, on 7 July 1974, that West Germany beat the Netherlands 2–1 in the World Cup final. Johan Neeskens scored a penalty in the second minute, Paul Breitner equalised from the spot, and Gerd Müller scored the winner in the 43rd minute. Five German players, among them Franz Beckenbauer and the goalkeeper Sepp Maier, became the first men to own gold, silver and bronze World Cup medals.
Since 2005 Bayern have played at the Allianz Arena on the Fröttmaning Heath at Munich’s northern edge, which holds 75,000 for league games and 70,000 for international matches. Its inflated ETFE panels made it the first stadium in the world with an exterior that can change to any colour. It hosted the Champions League finals of 2012 and 2025 and matches at Euro 2024. The city’s second club, TSV 1860 Munich, originally owned half of the stadium but sold its share to Bayern for €11 million in 2006 during a financial crisis, and Bayern ended 1860’s tenancy in 2017. In 2022 the arena even staged the first regular-season NFL game played in Germany.
Munich’s football memory also reaches beyond its own stadiums. The 1954 title, won 3–2 against Hungary in Bern, Switzerland, is still called the Miracle of Bern, and some historians credit it with restoring a sense of international recognition to West Germany nine years after the Second World War. Sixty years later, the 2014 win in Rio de Janeiro made Germany the only European nation to win a World Cup in South America.
Berlin’s Olympiastadion: Cup Finals Since 1985
The capital’s great stadium was designed by Werner March for the 1936 Summer Olympics, when crowds were reported at over 100,000. After a renovation completed in 2004 it seats 74,475 and is the largest German stadium for international football. Hertha BSC have played there since 1963, and every DFB-Pokal final since 1985 has been held there, so “Berlin” has become shorthand for reaching the cup final.
The stadium hosted the 2006 World Cup final, the 2011 Women’s World Cup, the 2015 Champions League final and the final of Euro 2024. The women’s game has its own Berlin story: the DFB banned official women’s matches until 1970, yet Germany went on to win the Women’s World Cup in 2003 and 2007, eight of the 14 Women’s European Championships, including six in a row from 1995 to 2013, and Olympic gold in 2016. Germany and Spain are the only countries to have won both the men’s and the women’s World Cup. Our page on the largest cities in Germany shows how closely the map of big clubs follows the map of big cities.
Kiel, Oberstdorf and the Nürburgring: Germany’s Other Sporting Places
Germany’s sports clubs had about 28 million members across more than 87,000 clubs in 2006, and several other sports have a home region of their own. Handball is strongest in the north. THW Kiel, on the Baltic coast in Schleswig-Holstein, are the record German champions with 23 titles and completed a treble of league, cup and EHF Champions League in both 2007 and 2012; in 2012 they won every league match. Germany hosted the 2007 World Men’s Handball Championship in 12 cities and won it, with the final played at the Kölnarena in Cologne.
Winter sports belong to Bavaria’s Alpine edge. Almost every season since 1953, the Four Hills ski-jumping tournament has opened at Oberstdorf and moved on to Garmisch-Partenkirchen before crossing into Austria for Innsbruck and Bischofshofen. Motor racing gathers in the Eifel hills of Rhineland-Palatinate at the Nürburgring, whose 20.83 km Nordschleife, built in the 1920s, was nicknamed the Green Hell by Jackie Stewart; the 1976 German Grand Prix there was the last Formula One race on a circuit of 10 km or more, and Michael Schumacher won five times at the Nürburgring. Basketball has risen too, with the national team winning the 2023 FIBA World Cup. Across all sports, German athletes have won 1,854 Olympic medals, 1,419 in summer and 435 in winter, the second-highest total of any nation, and the country has hosted the Summer Games twice, in Berlin in 1936 and Munich in 1972, and the Winter Games once, at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1936.
None of these comes near football’s reach, which is why the answer is the same in Kiel as in Munich. For the people who built that reputation, from Franz Beckenbauer to Birgit Prinz, see our list of famous people from Germany, and for the rivalry with the neighbour Germany met in the 1974 final, read about the national sport of the Netherlands.