Bayern Munich are in the news for all the wrong reasons right now. The club were embarrassed by Xabi Alonso’s Bayer Leverkusen 3-0 in Bundesliga Matchweek 22. They followed that performance up by losing 1-0 to Lazio in the Champions League and letting lowly Bochum beat them 3-2 in the Bundesliga.
Now, Thomas Tuchel says he will leave the club at the end of the season. As bad as things are at Bayern now, things have been much, much worse in the past. Because FC Hollywood are at such a low point now, let’s look at some of those bad times and look at the 5 biggest scandals in Bayern Munich history.
Concealing payments to players in the 1960s & 70s
Bayern Munich are one of the biggest football teams in the world, but it wasn’t always this way. As the story goes, Bayern were just a regular German team until the arrival of superstar youngsters Gerd Müller and Franz Beckenbauer in the mid-1960s, who then turned Bayern into the dominant team in German football. It turns out the story is a little more complicated than that.
According to Hans Woller, a renowned Bavarian historian, Müller and Beckenbauer only stayed at Bayern because the club was paying them millions of Deutsche Marks under the table. Robert Swan needed an extra 350,000 D-Marks per year to keep his stars at the club. With the help of people in the Bavarian government, including State Secretary Erich Kiesl, Bayern made these tax-free payments to Müller, Beckenbauer, and other players. The extent of this scandal was not known until years later.
In Woller’s own words, the footballing giant that is Bayern Munich today wouldn’t have been possible without the “criminal downside” of the club in the 1960s and 70s.
The Kirch Affair
The second entry on our list of biggest Bayern Scandals is another one relating to under-the-table payments.
In 1999, Bayern Munich were on the verge of becoming the one truly dominant team in German football. Because of this, Bayern were looking to separate themselves further from the rest of the Bundesliga and sign their own television rights deal, a departure from the league’s practice of signing collective TV rights deals and splitting the revenue evenly.
A Bavarian businessman named Leo Kirch, who owned the Kirch Group media company, talked Bayern out of their plan to sign an independent TV deal. Instead, Kirch proposed that Bayern help his company secure television rights for the entire Bundesliga. In exchange for lobbying the Kirch Group to other Bundesliga clubs, Bayern would get an extra €10 million per season.
Bayern agreed to this deal and secretly received over €20 million from the Kirch Group before the scandal was exposed in 2003.
Threatening to leave the Bundesliga and join Serie A
Once the Kirch Affair went public in 2003, Bayern went on the offensive. Club chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and other Bayern Munich icons hit out at the Bundesliga and insisted they had done nothing wrong by taking under-the-table payments from Leo Kirch and the Kirch Group.
The Bundesliga saw things differently and held discussions about deducting points from Bayern in the 2003/04 Bundesliga. To Bayern, this was outrageous. “We will not accept a points deduction,” said Rummenigge at the time. “That’s a question of principle,” he added. This debate culminated in August 2003, when Bayern Munich threatened to leave the Bundesliga and join Serie A.
As we all know, Bayern didn’t leave the Bundesliga to play in Italian football. However, the threat might have worked. Bayern were not deducted any points for the Kirch Affair. Instead, they were fined a measly €3 million.
Qatar Airways sponsorship
While the other Bayern scandals were all under-the-table deals, this one was all above board. In some sense, that makes it worse.
In 2011, Bayern Munich began holding warm-weather training camps in Qatar during the Bundesliga’s winter break. Fans were enraged by this. Qatar then, and now, is a country known for committing serious human rights abuses and discrimination against members of the LGBT+ community. Bayern higher-ups didn’t care and scaled up their partnership with the Qataris. By 2018, Qatar Airways was one of Bayern’s biggest sponsors. The state-run airline’s logo was on the front of Bayern training tops and on the sleeves of the club’s actual kits.
The Bayern Qatari sponsorship deal was worth €20 million per year. Fans protested the arrangement regularly, and the club eventually let the sponsorship lapse in 2023. “Better late than never,” said many Bayern fans, but to others, the whole ordeal left a stain that the club still needs to do a lot of work to wash away.
Uli Hoeneß’s tax evasion scandal
Almost no one is more synonymous with Bayern Munich than Uli Hoeneß. The now-72-year-old is one of Bayern and Germany’s most successful players ever. He then went on to become Bayern’s general manager in 1979 immediately after retiring as a player. He stayed in that role for 30 years until he was elected club president in 2009.
In 2013, while he was Bayern President, Hoeneß was formally accused of tax evasion. The German government alleged that Hoeneß used a Swiss bank account to evade paying taxes in his home country. On March 13, 2014, Hoeneß was convicted of seven counts of tax evasion and sentenced to serve three and a half years in prison.
Hoeneß resigned the next day and was released from prison in February 2016. He was re-elected as Bayern President just six months later, and currently serves as the club’s Deputy chairman and honorary president.
