7 Crazy Facts About Der Klassiker (Bauern Munich vs Borussia Dortmund)

Der Klassiker isn’t an official competition; it’s a nickname. But in modern German football, Bayern Munich vs Borussia Dortmund has become the blockbuster fixture and the Bundesliga's flagship rivalry. The two clubs have turned simple league matches into title deciders, cup finals, transfer soap operas and global TV events.

As of the 2024-25 season, they’ve won 27 of the last 32 Bundesliga titles between them, turning their rivalry into the axis around which the whole league spins. Here are seven wild, slightly unbelievable facts that show why Der Klassiker is so much more than “just another big game”.

1. Dortmund Won the First Klassiker… Then Bayern Took Over the Timeline

The very first Bundesliga meeting between the two was played on 16 October 1965 in Munich, and it was Dortmund, not Bayern, who set the tone with a 2-0 away win. Fast-forward to today, and the head-to-head numbers look entirely different. Across all competitions, Bayern now lead the series with 68 wins to Dortmund’s 33, with 37 draws and a 270-172 goal difference in their favour.

What started, according to Reuters, as an even, occasionally Dortmund-titled matchup in the 1960s flipped hard since Bayern’s 1970s super-team emerged. The crazy part: modern fans often assume Bayern’s dominance was inevitable, but on day one of Der Klassiker, it was BVB walking out of Munich with the points and the bragging rights, till they weren’t.

2. The 11-1 massacre: Bayern’s Biggest Ever Bundesliga Win

On 27 November 1971, Bayern inflicted a scoreline on Dortmund that still looks like a typo: 11-1 in Munich. According to FC Bayern’s official website, it remains Bayern’s biggest Bundesliga win of all time and one of the heaviest defeats in Dortmund’s history. Contemporary accounts describe BVB completely collapsing after falling behind, with Bayern ruthlessly piling on goals rather than taking their foot off the gas.

The match has haunted Dortmund for decades; even their 12-0 loss to Borussia Monchengladbach in 1978 only just beats it for sheer brutality. Whenever Der Klassiker is billed as “unpredictable,” older fans can’t help remembering that, once upon a time, Bayern didn’t just beat Dortmund, they demolished them by double digits.

3. A 5-2 Cup Final Humiliation, Led by a Man Who’d Soon Join Bayern

Der Klassiker is often framed as Bayern bullying Dortmund, but in the 2012 DFB-Pokal final, the roles were reversed spectacularly. Jürgen Klopp’s Dortmund smashed Bayern 5-2 in Berlin, completing a domestic double and handing the Bavarians a genuinely traumatic defeat.

The star of the night was Robert Lewandowski, who scored a hat-trick for BVB, against the very club he would join on a free transfer two years later, and then torment the league with. According to the official Bundesliga website, it is one of those wild “future plot twists” matches: Bayern being dismantled by the striker who would later become a club legend in Munich. At the same time, Dortmund fans sang his name as the hero of their greatest Klassiker victory of the modern era.

4. The 2013 Champions League Final: Klassiker on a Global Stage

On 25 May 2013, Der Klassiker went global; Bayern and Dortmund met at Wembley in the first all-German UEFA Champions League final. In front of 86,298 fans, Bayern won 2-1 with goals from Mario Mandzukic and an 89th-minute winner from Arjen Robben, after Llkay Gundogan’s penalty had levelled the score.

According to the UEFA website, the match wasn’t just dramatic; it was huge. Broadcasters reported more than 360 million viewers worldwide, making it the most-watched sports broadcast of 2013. A week later, Bayern completed the treble by winning the DFB-Pokal as well. For Dortmund, the late Robben goal became a resume that still gets mentioned whenever they return to Wembley; for Bayern fans, it is often voted the greatest goal in the club’s history.

5. The Transfer Soap Opera: Gotze, Lewandowski, Hummels and Co.

Few rivalries have seen so much talent cross the divide. Dozens of players have represented both clubs, including Michael Rummenigge, Jurgen Kohler, Mats Hummels, Robert Lewandowski, Mario Gotze, Niklas Sule, Raphael Guerreiro, and Marcel Sabitzer. The craziest chapter came in April 2013 when Dortmund confirmed Mario Gotze’s 37 million pound release clause had been triggered by Bayern, with the move scheduled for that summer.

The timing, as The Guardian reported, was just before Dortmund’s Champions League semi-final and a few weeks before the Bayern v BVB final was officially set, causing an uproar among the BVB fans. Gotze later revealed that he and his family had faced harassment and even needed police protection at home because of the backlash. When you add Lewandowski’s later free transfer and Hummels moving between Bayern and BVB like a ping-pong, Der Klassiker sometimes feels like a rivalry and a shared HR department rolled into one.

6. Monster Number: Khan’s 84 saves, Muller’s Appearances, Lewandowski’s Goals

Dig into the data, and Der klassiker throws up some ridiculous individual numbers that almost feel like a typo. According to the stats on the Bundesliga website, Oliver Kahn made 84 saves in Klassiker fixtures, the highest for any keeper in the era of detailed data collection, ahead of Roman Weidenfeller’s 67 saves. On the outfield side, Thomas Müller holds the record for most Klassiker appearances with 44 games.

Robert Lewandowski, on the other hand, is the all-time scorer with 32 goals, made even more insane by the fact that he found the net for both sides during his career. Take those together, and you get a sense of scale; one goalkeeper facing a small season’s worth of shots just against one opponent and a striker who basically scored a full league campaign of goals in a single rivalry.

7. A Rivalry That Controls the Title Race - Even in 2025

As of the 2024-25 season, Bayern and Dortmund have combined to win 27 of the last 32 Bundesliga titles, making Der Klassiker effectively a recurring mini-final for German football. That pattern has continued into the mid-2020s: in October 2025, Bayern beat Dortmund 2-1 in a top-of-the-table Klassiker to extend a perfect start under Vincent Kompany, with Harry Kane scoring one and delivering a 60-metre assist for the other while Manuel Neuer set a new league record with his 363rd Bundesliga win.

Even when the game ends in a draw, like the wild 2-2 in April 2025, as Reuters states, it tends to reshape the title race, the Champions League qualification battle, or both. In other words, Der Klassiker isn’t just about bragging rights; it’s about who runs Germany for the next 12 months.

The Rivalry that Writes History

Der klassiker has everything: historic thrashings, cup finals, treble-defining heartbreak, soap opera-level betrayals, typo-looking statistical freaks and a firm hold on the Bundesliga title trophy. Whether you tune in for the tactics, the drama or just the chaos, Bayern vs Dortmund reliably delivers the kind of “how is this real?” moments that justify its billing as Germany’s ultimate football classic.