Eleven Men Walk Out of a Gym Club — and Build Bayern Munich
On February 27, 1900, eleven players walked out of Munich's MTV 1879 gym club and founded FC Bayern, now one of the most successful football clubs in the world.
On the evening of February 27, 1900, eleven football players walked out of a Munich restaurant — and accidentally founded one of the greatest sports clubs on earth.
The walkout began with a bureaucratic insult. The eleven men played for the football division of MTV München von 1879, the city's venerable gymnastics club. When the division asked to join the South German Football Association so it could play organized competitive matches, the gymnasts' steering committee said no. So that evening, led by a 27-year-old Berliner named Franz John, the footballers left the club's meeting and reconvened at the Weinhaus Gisela on Fürstenstraße. Before the night was over, they had founded their own club: Fußball-Club Bayern München. John was elected its first president, a post he would hold until 1903. The club colors were set as white and blue, and the membership fee was fixed at one mark.
The new club wasted no time. That March, Bayern won its first recorded match, beating 1. Münchner FC 1896 by 5–2, and in 1902 it thrashed local rival 1860 Munich 3–0 in their first derby. By 1920 the club had some 700 members, making it the largest football club in Munich. In 1906, needing a proper ground, Bayern affiliated with the Münchner Sport Club and adopted its red-and-white colors — the colors the team still wears today.
The founding owed much to Gustav Manning, a football enthusiast who had already helped organize the game in southern Germany and threw his weight behind the breakaway. The charter's signers included men from Berlin, Freiburg, Leipzig, and Bremen — and two Jewish members, Josef Pollack and the future sculptor Benno Elkan, a reminder of how central Jewish athletes and officials were to the young club. That heritage would matter: Bayern won its first German championship in 1932 under its Jewish president Kurt Landauer and coach Richard "Little Dombi" Kohn, and the Nazi regime later smeared the club as a "Jewish club," driving Landauer into exile.
From that restaurant-table beginning, Bayern grew into a giant. It is Germany's most successful football club and one of the most decorated in the world, with six European Cup and Champions League titles, a record haul of German championships, and more than 300,000 official members — among the largest memberships in global sport. Its modern home, the glowing Allianz Arena, sits a few miles from the spot where eleven frustrated footballers once refused to take no for an answer.
It is a fitting origin story for a club famous for its defiance: FC Bayern München was born the night its founders walked out the door.
Photo: Richard Bartz, CC BY-SA 2.5 (via Wikimedia Commons)
