Munich Olympic Stadium

Munich argued about a large stadium from soon after the First World War, as football gained popularity in the city, and a scheme on the Oberwiesenfeld failed in 1919 against an objection by the Bavarian state. TSV 1860's ground at Grünwalder Straße in Giesing, expanded to hold 40,000 spectators in 1926, was the largest in Munich, enough for championship football but not for internationals: the Germany against Switzerland match of 1926 showed demand far above the number of tickets that could be sold. Early in the Nazi period local NSDAP politicians planned a stadium for 60,000 to 80,000 spectators west of Munich-Riem airport, mirroring the Reichssportfeld in Berlin, but the airport administration resisted and with the outbreak of the Second World War the plans were finally rejected. The Grünwalder Stadion, destroyed in the war, held 50,000 after renovation and was again the largest in the city; the municipal sports committee judged that too low and pressed for 75,000, while the Münchner Merkur called in early 1951 for a new stadium on the Oberwiesenfeld instead. The project ended for the time being with the ten-year programme of 10 March 1955, which promoted district sports facilities.

Because the Grünwalder ground was small, no Germany international had been played in Munich since 1940. When the Bavarian party revived the question in 1958 both Munich clubs resisted, fearing the capacity would never be used and the project would ruin them. By the middle of the 1960s Munich was the only German city with two Bundesliga clubs, both playing for the upper places in the table and at times represented in international competition, and the largest ground in the city, back to 45,000 places of which only 3,800 were seated, was found too small once more. A larger stadium was thought necessary to hold the Munich clubs at that level, the paying public still being their main source of income at the time. Georg Brauchle, then deputy mayor, was meanwhile working to bring the 1972 Summer Olympics to Munich; in October 1965 Mayor Hans-Jochen Vogel and Willi Daume, president of the West German National Olympic Committee, decided to test the city's suitability for the Games, and after talks that included Federal Chancellor Ludwig Erhard and the Bavarian prime minister Alfons Goppel they concluded that a bid could be worth making. For that, a new and modern stadium had to be built.

Munich opened an architectural competition for a large stadium in 1964, won by the offices of Henschker from Brunswick and Deiss from Munich, and the planning of 1965 put the stadium at around 100,000 spectators, a figure later reduced with an eye to reuse. On 26 April 1966 the IOC announced that Munich had prevailed against Detroit, Madrid and Montreal, and with that the stadium was decided. The site was the three square kilometre and largely undeveloped Oberwiesenfeld, whose closeness to the centre let the city campaign under the slogan "Olympia of the short ways". It had served as the parade ground of the Bavarian cavalry regiment and later mainly military purposes; Munich's airport stood there from 1931 to 1939, and after the Second World War the rubble from the bombing of the city was heaped up into the Olympic Mountain, given an oval shape on purpose so that it could serve as the foundation for a stadium's terracing. The first plans were criticised for a lack of unity in the urban planning, the Association of German Architects urged that monumentality be avoided at the sports facilities because of the Nazi past, and they were finally rejected.

A second competition was advertised in February 1967, and by the deadline of 3 July 104 designs had been submitted, one of them from Behnisch & Partner. Günter Behnisch and his employee Fritz Auer planned to set the stadium, the Olympic hall and the swimming hall closely together west of the Olympic tower, whose base already existed. When a model had been built at a scale of 1:1000, the employee Cord Wehrse brought in the idea of laying a tent roof over the three buildings, having become aware of Frei Otto's tent roof at the world fair in Montreal through a newspaper article; with Carlo Weber and Heinz Isler the model was supplemented with wooden sticks and parts of a woman's stocking, and the architects thought of the Olympic roof as a circus tent. The jury eliminated it after the first round as too daring, but the juror Egon Eiermann intervened and campaigned for the model with Vogel and Daume among others, and the reviewers ultimately voted for the Behnisch & Partner plan. The decision was announced on 13 October 1967, the model having convinced the jury with its landscape architecture, its tent roof, the short distances and the possibility of reuse. The stadium was laid out for 90,000 spectators, a figure later cut back.

Work began on 9 June 1969, once the terminal building of the old airfield had been blown up, though construction started officially only with the laying of the cornerstone at a symbolic ceremony on 14 July 1969; on the Oberwiesenfeld alone there were 60 building sites, the Olympic village and other venues going up alongside the stadium. Of a total 1.35 billion German marks, 137 million went into the stadium and another 170.6 million into the tent roof, and about 5,000 building workers put in more than a million hours between them. According to Behnisch the stadium was to be a "democratic sports venue", answering to the ideas of Mayor Vogel and the specifications of Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt and setting a contrast to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin during the period of National Socialism, until then the only summer Games held in Germany; Munich had carried the reputation of being the "capital of the Nazi movement" since that period, and the Games were meant to help improve the city's standing. The deed in the stadium's foundation stated that the planned Games should "bear witness to the spirit of our people in the last third of the 20th century". Behnisch took Frei Otto as partner architect, his Montreal roof having been the model for the Olympic one, and Otto became the development consultant for the construction, with Fritz Leonhardt and Wolfhardt Andrä in the team around him. Under the direction of the civil engineer Jörg Schlaich the roof was completed on 21 April 1972; its sweeping canopies of acrylic glass stabilised by steel cables were used on that scale for the first time, and the lightweight tent construction was considered revolutionary for its time. Planning, construction and financing were steered by Olympia-Baugesellschaft mbH München, founded in 1967 by the Federal Republic of Germany, the Free State of Bavaria and the city of Munich.

The shells of the buildings stood by the summer of 1970, the topping-out ceremony was celebrated on 23 July 1970, and the completed buildings were handed to the organising committee at the end of June 1972. The plans had forgotten to allocate dressing rooms for football teams inside the stadium, so from 24 May 1972 until the official opening on 26 May two medical rooms were provisionally converted into changing rooms. The stadium opened on 26 May 1972 with the international between the Federal Republic and the Soviet Union, which the hosts won 4-1 before around 80,000 in a sold-out ground; it was the first international played in Munich since 1940. FC Bayern played there for the first time on 28 June 1972, beating FC Schalke 04 5-1 in the closing match of the season to become German champions, and TSV 1860 followed on 2 August 1972 in a league cup tie.

Federal President Gustav Heinemann opened the XX Summer Olympics in the stadium on 26 August 1972. After more than 7,100 athletes from 121 nations had marched in, the young sportsman Günter Zahn lit the Olympic flame above the ranks of the east stand. The first Olympic football match was played on 27 August and the athletics began four days later. During the Games 70,824 tickets, including the unsaleable ones, were available for the events held in the stadium, while daily audiences at the track and field competitions were estimated at 80,000 to 90,000. Eleven football matches were played there within fifteen days, more than in any comparable stretch since, and numerous world records were set on the track, among them new best marks by Lasse Virén, Mary Peters and Ulrike Meyfarth, and by Renate Stecher of the German Democratic Republic in both the women's 100 and 200 metres.

On 5 September 1972, after about two thirds of the Games, Palestinian terrorists of the Black September group murdered two members of the Israeli Olympic team early in the morning and took nine more hostage. The competitions set for that day were cancelled one after another from the afternoon, among them the match between the German amateur selection and Hungary; the 30,000 spectators had to leave the stadium, which happened without protest. Eighteen hours after the seizure the terrorists moved with the hostages to the military airfield at Fürstenfeldbruck, where a rescue attempt failed and all the hostages, five of the terrorists and one policeman lost their lives. On the following day, 6 September 1972, a spontaneous memorial ceremony was held in the stadium before full ranks, with an address by the Federal President; at it the IOC president Avery Brundage announced that the Games must go on. Each event was put back by a day, so that Germany against Hungary was made up in the stadium on the day of the ceremony itself. On 8 September the German Democratic Republic beat the Federal Republic 3-2 before 80,000 spectators, and the football tournament was won on 10 September by Poland, who beat Hungary 2-1 in the final. The closing ceremony was thinned out from the programme originally planned, out of respect for the victims of 5 September, and after the Olympic flame had gone out the spectators stood in memory of those killed.

After the Games the stadium was mainly the home of FC Bayern, who took a run of titles in the seasons that followed; the local rivals TSV 1860, in the second division until 1977, also used the Grünwalder Stadion in the early years. At the home opening of the 1973/74 season, against FC Augsburg on 15 August 1973, TSV 1860 drew a record crowd: the official figures gave 73,000 in a sold-out stadium, matching its permitted capacity, while some observers put the real number at around 100,000. With a crush still at the ticket windows as the match began and TSV 1860 ahead after three minutes, spectators forced their way in past fences and barriers, and 136 people were injured. The match is still regarded as the second-division game with the highest attendance anywhere in the world. The Südkurve established itself as the end from which the FC Bayern support cheered its team and the Nordkurve as that of the TSV 1860 followers, and in the best-attended years up to 1.8 million spectators a season came into the stadium.

The national team used Munich more often than in previous years, and the stadium hosted fourteen West Germany and Germany internationals in all, from the 4-1 against the Soviet Union at its opening to the 1-5 against England in a 2002 World Cup qualifier on 1 September 2001. For the 1974 World Cup a stand for up to 5,000 spectators was added in the Nordkurve; the final on 7 July 1974, in which West Germany beat the Netherlands 2-1, was attended by 75,200. The UEFA Euro 1988 final was played there, as were European Cup finals in 1979, 1993 and 1997: Nottingham Forest won the first of their consecutive European Cups on the ground in 1979, and Borussia Dortmund won the 1997 Champions League final there. The stadium has been used for concerts since 1982 as the largest concert stage in Munich. The European Athletics Championships were held there from 6 to 11 August 2002, awarded to Munich after Chemnitz withdrew its candidacy in 1995 when the Saxon state government refused funding; the athletics installations and the seating were renewed for them.

Into the 1990s the stadium counted as Germany's best for capacity and fittings, an advantage FC Bayern could use against its league rivals. During that decade television rights gained in importance and the size of a ground receded as an economic argument. The Hillsborough disaster of 1989 in Sheffield changed what was demanded of stadium safety. After the 1990 World Cup in Italy, played in several newly built or renovated grounds, a European model of the modern and more comfortable stadium took hold, marked among other things by a closeness between crowd and pitch that the running track at the edge of the Munich playing field does not give. Günter Behnisch held the copyright, and with it the design rights, until his death and refused to consent to a modernisation, so the Bayern leadership first considered a new build in the early 1990s, against resistance from a city administration that feared the stadium would decay. In its last football years the city earned some four to five million euros a year renting it to the two clubs, who paid ten per cent of gate receipts and a flat share of perimeter advertising, while still losing about ten million a year on the upkeep of the Olympic grounds. In autumn 1998 Behnisch worked up compromise proposals to the specifications of the Bayern manager Uli Hoeneß, covering the far side and lowering the pitch, at a cost put at 150 million marks. After the 2006 World Cup was awarded to Germany in July 2000, Franz Beckenbauer pressed for a new stadium so that Munich could be considered as a venue at all; a consensus model by Behnisch was agreed that October, but the Bürgerbegehren Olympiastadion initiative gathered 40,000 signatures for a referendum, and after Manfred Sabatke of the Behnisch office raised doubts on 6 December 2000 the parties settled on 19 December for a new stadium instead. In the referendum of October 2001 almost two thirds voted for the new build, realised as the Allianz Arena at Fröttmaning. On 23 November 2004 Maccabi Tel Aviv played FC Bayern in a Champions League group match, the first Israeli team to play in the stadium since the hostage-taking of 1972, and before the match the visiting club's board laid a wreath in memory of the attack. TSV 1860 took its leave on 3 April 2005 against 1. FC Köln, and FC Bayern played its last match there on 14 May 2005 against 1. FC Nürnberg.

Since the clubs moved out the stadium has been used mainly for open-air concerts and large public viewing events, with Robbie Williams, Bon Jovi, AC/DC, U2 and Depeche Mode among those who played there repeatedly on tour. Its surface was repeatedly given over to motor sport: gravel and tar were laid for the stock car grand prix of 5 May 2007, the first held in Europe, and it was turned into a race track for the DTM in 2011 and again in 2012, when the whole surface was asphalted and covered with artificial turf. The DTM event was never a points-scoring round and the stadium withdrew from it in 2013. At the end of 2016, with the DTM meetings and the BMW centenary celebration past, Olympiapark München GmbH decided to lay natural grass again, the asphalt no longer being defensible under the building's protected status; the planting was finished in April 2017.

The stadium hosted the UEFA Women's Champions League final on 17 May 2012, won by Olympique Lyonnais for their second consecutive trophy before a record attendance for that final, and the European Athletics Championships returned in 2022. Munich bid in 2009 for the 2018 Winter Olympics with the opening and closing ceremonies planned for the stadium once more, but the IOC gave the South Korean city of Pyeongchang preference on 6 July 2011, and a further bid for the following Winter Games was dropped after a referendum in November 2013. When Türkgücü München went up to the 3. Liga for the 2020/21 season, DFB statutes forbade three clubs sharing the Grünwalder ground and neither TSV 1860 nor the FC Bayern amateurs would move, so it was agreed that Türkgücü could play up to eight home games in the Olympiastadion. The match against SV Wehen Wiesbaden on 10 October 2020 was the first football played there since 14 May 2005 apart from the women's final of 2012, and it went ahead behind closed doors because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The club moved back in for the tenth matchday of 2021/22 and played its remaining eleven home games there until, insolvent, it stopped playing in March 2022.

At the end of 2009 technicians established that the upper concrete rim of the main stand had rotted and become unsound, with a danger of collapse if it were not repaired soon; scaffolding went up on the northern part of the stand in April 2010 and the work was completed in November 2011 at a reported cost of about 10.7 million euros. From 17 October 2014, after the Bayern-Kaserne had been overfilled, the stadium's VIP area was used briefly to house refugees, with room for 180 people. On 20 January 2015 the city's economic committee resolved on a full refurbishment costing around 76 million euros, rejecting cheaper alternatives that would have fitted the building out as a museum or left its interiors untouched; in April 2015 Munich's third mayor, Christine Strobl, proposed building into the stadium a museum of the 1972 Olympics that would also set out the attack on the Israeli team, a plan the SPD group on the city council supported. The tent roof was approved for refurbishment by the city council in March 2022 at an estimated 84 million euros, an estimate that had reached 200 million a year later, with the park company's supervisory board papers already pointing to as much as 280 million; on 23 September 2025 the council's economic committee released a sum calculated at no less than 298 million, the city intending to negotiate a share from the Free State, the federal government and possibly the European Union. The stadium and the other buildings under the tent roof have stood under monument protection since 1997. It is run by Olympiapark München GmbH, wholly owned by the city of Munich and answering within the city administration to the Referat für Arbeit und Wirtschaft, and holds 63,118 seated spectators, or up to 77,337 for concerts depending on the configuration.