Supporters
Bayern considers itself a national club. The club has more than 147,000 members and 2,437 fanclubs, making it the club with the largest number of organized supporters in Germany. Owing partly to the club having supporters all over the country, all of Bayern's away games have been sold out in recent years. Their following is mainly recruited from the aspiring middle class and regional Bavaria. Despite a large proportion of their supporters having to travel more than 200 km (ca. 120 miles) regularly, the club's home matches in the Allianz Arena have almost always been sold out. According to a study by Sport+Markt Bayern is the fifth-most popular football club in Europe with 20.7 million supporters, and the most popular football club in Germany with 10 million supporters.
Bayern Munich is also renowned for its well-organized ultra scene. The most prominent groups are the Schickeria München, the Red Munichs '89, the Südkurve '73, the Munichmaniacs 1996, the Service Crew Munich, the Red Angels, the Tavernen Crew München, and the Red Sharks. Stern des Südens is the song which fans sing at FCB home games. In the 1990s they also used to sing FC Bayern, Forever Number One.
The club also has quite a number of high profile supporters, among them Pope Benedict XVI, the current Pope, Boris Becker, retired German tennis player, Wladimir Klitschko, Ukrainian boxer, and Horst Seehofer and Edmund Stoiber, current and former Minister-President of Bavaria, to name just a few.
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Famous quotes containing the word supporters:
“The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“His [O.J. Simpson’s] supporters lined the freeway to cheer him on Friday and commentators talked about his tragedy. Did those people see the photographs of the crime scene and the great blackening pools of blood seeping into the sidewalk? Did battered women watch all this on television and realize more vividly than ever before that their lives were cheap and their pain inconsequential?”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“No Government can be long secure without a formidable Opposition. It reduces their supporters to that tractable number which can be managed by the joint influences of fruition and hope. It offers vengeance to the discontented, and distinction to the ambitious; and employs the energies of aspiring spirits, who otherwise may prove traitors in a division or assassins in a debate.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)