FC Bayern is investing more and more money in women’s football. Honorary President Uli Hoeneß would like to promote sport. The Unterhaching sports park was also bought for this purpose. The Bundesliga, however, has a general problem.
There should be a special setting for the big game. The FC Bayern women’s soccer team will play their home game in the quarter-finals of the Champions League at the Allianz Arena at the beginning of April. The team led by national team captain Giulia Gwinn is playing in the large stadium for the third time this season; it will face the winner of the pairing Manchester United against Atlético Madrid.
This development is not the only thing that shows that women’s football is growing for the German men’s record champions. This week the auditing and consulting firm Deloitte published the “Football Money League 2026”. The study shows: FC Bayern’s footballers doubled their total turnover last season to 7.2 million euros and are now among the ten financially strongest clubs in the world. For the fourth time, Deloitte has listed the 15 highest-grossing women’s football clubs worldwide, although important markets such as the USA and Australia were not taken into account due to a lack of data. According to the study, the top clubs in women’s football collectively generated sales of over 150 million euros for the first time.
The leader is the Champions League winner FC Arsenal (25.6 million euros) ahead of FC Chelsea (25.4) and last year’s first team FC Barcelona (22.0). The Munich women jumped from 13th to ninth place. The only other German club in the top 15 is Eintracht Frankfurt with a turnover of 4.7 million. The Hessians were still at six million last year.
FC Bayern benefited from its tournament victory in the newly created World Sevens Football (W7F) small-field series. In the mini-competition played in Portugal last May, the Munich women received around 2.3 million euros – around one million more than they received for winning the Champions League in 2025.
FC Bayern buys stadium in Unterhaching
In relation to men, 7.2 million euros in sales is not a lot. FC Bayern recently had a total turnover of around one billion euros, and the men’s squad is estimated to be worth around 980 million euros. But doubling women’s sales is a great success for the people of Munich.
Jennifer Haskel, Deloitte Sports Business Group, said: “Revenue growth at women’s football clubs reflects continued innovation and strong commercial focus in some of the sport’s leading markets. Women’s football is starting to chart its own course – with new and expanded brand partnerships, new ticketing strategies and a clear focus on truly understanding the changing fan base.”
CEO Jan-Christian Dreesen, President Herbert Hainer and Honorary President Uli Hoeneß would like to support Bayern women even more in the future. The club recently bought the stadium where the men’s regional league club Spielvereinigung Unterhaching plays. From the 2026/2027 season onwards, the FCB women will play their home games there. “The acquisition of the Unterhaching sports park is another milestone for the overall development of our FC Bayern women,” said Dreesen. “The new sporting home of our women’s team will meet UEFA’s requirements and also meet spectator demand in the future.”
The stadium holds 15,000 spectators. So far, the women have mostly played at the FC Bayern Campus, where the venue only holds 2,500 spectators.
It will be exciting this year to see how the clubs in the women’s Bundesliga generally work with the German Football Association (DFB). At the beginning of December 2025, the league association (Frauen-Bundesliga FBL eV) was founded in Deutsche Bank Park in Frankfurt/Main. The event was originally supposed to be held on the campus of the German Football Association and result in an FBL GmbH with the association. That didn’t happen.
Jennifer Zietz sees the dispute between the league and the DFB as still having a chance of the originally planned joint venture occurring. “Everything is open, the door is never closed. Courageous steps are needed. It’s about the rapid development of women’s football and the more competent people contribute to it, the better,” said the managing director of women’s professional football at 1. FC Union Berlin.
In particular, Dreesen and Axel Hellmann, boss of Eintracht Frankfurt, had publicly criticized the DFB in advance. At the association you feel snubbed by the media blitz. Negotiations between the 14 clubs with their new league association president Katharina Kiel from Eintracht Frankfurt and the DFB are scheduled to resume on January 26th in Frankfurt.
“At the time the league association was founded, it was not possible to work with the DFB. We clubs are very much in agreement. At the moment we have one less player at the table who also has to get the regional associations behind him,” said Zietz, a former national player at Turbine Potsdam.
The 42-year-old also emphasized: “If the clubs invest so much, then it is clear that they should have the majority of votes in the end. That is one of the crucial points in the negotiations with the DFB.”
The association, which would fully finance the joint venture, demands a say on many issues. The association pledged just over 100 million euros for the next eight years. About half would go directly to the clubs, the other half to the joint venture. The second league, which the DFB wants to integrate into the FBL in four to five years, is to receive a further around 25 million euros over the same period.
Julien Wolff is a sports editor at the Sports Competence Center. He reports for WORLD for many years from Munich about FC Bayern and the national team as well as about fitness topics.
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