Buy Mainz 05 tickets for the 2026/27 season and you are buying into the most improbable recovery German football has produced this decade. On 3 December 2025 the club sat bottom of the Bundesliga with six points from thirteen matches. Four months later they beat Strasbourg 2-0 at the Mewa Arena in a Conference League quarter-final, and they finished the league campaign tenth on forty points. Urs Fischer had been in the job since 7 December.
Thousands trust 1BoxOffice
That recovery reset the mood without resetting the prices. A standing season card in the Rheinhessen stand still costs €199 for the whole campaign and a seated one starts at €399, figures the club itself describes as among the least expensive in the division. The ground holds 33,305 with 13,700 of those places standing, which is close to two fifths of the capacity on a terrace. Scarcity at this club has never been about money.
What it is about is size. Mainz is a city of roughly 220,000 people with a settled season ticket base and more than 20,000 members, and the arena is one of the smaller grounds in the top flight. For most of the calendar that arithmetic works in a buyer's favour. For the handful of fixtures where it does not, the resale market is where the remaining places sit.
Season card renewal at Mainz is automatic. Holders keep their place unless they cancel, which means the pool of seats that reaches open sale each summer is small and largely fixed before the fixture list is even published. Free sale for 2026/27 ran from 1 June to 19 July. Anyone who missed that window is buying match by match, and for the highest-demand dates that is a race against a membership base of more than 20,000 people with earlier access.
The secondary market solves a different problem from the one most people assume. It is not primarily about sold-out fixtures, because at Mainz relatively few of them are. It is about matching a specific date to a specific group of people. If four of you want to sit together for the Frankfurt derby, or you need a Saturday rather than a Friday because of a flight, a marketplace lets you see what is actually available across multiple sellers in one place rather than refreshing a queue.
Timing is the second use. Mainz release inventory in stages and the picture on the club's own channels changes week to week, which is fine if you live in Rheinhessen and awkward if you are booking travel from abroad three months ahead. Resale listings let you fix the date first and worry about nothing else afterwards. For a supporter flying in for one weekend, that certainty is worth more than the last few pounds of difference on the face value.
1BoxOffice has been trading live event inventory since 2006, which puts close to two decades of completed transactions behind the listings on this page. In resale the risk is almost never the price. It is whether the barcode in your inbox opens a turnstile on the day, and that is the part worth checking before you buy anywhere.
Sellers here are verified before their stock goes live and every confirmed order carries a guarantee that pays out at 150% if something fails. That figure exists because a failed ticket does not just cost you the ticket. It costs the flight, the hotel and the afternoon.
Mainz sell out far more often than their league position or their city's population would suggest. Average attendance has sat close to capacity for most of the past decade, and the reason is structural rather than seasonal. A large standing terrace priced at the bottom of the Bundesliga range, a membership that grew by almost 60 percent in the two years to May 2024 and a catchment that pulls from Wiesbaden and the wider Rhine-Main area all push demand above what the ground can hold.
The pattern for 2026/27 is straightforward once you know which group a fixture belongs to. There is no European football this season, which removes the midweek continental dates that made last winter unusual, and the calendar reverts to seventeen home league matches plus whatever the DFB-Pokal produces. Within that, demand splits sharply.
The practical conclusion is that four or five home dates behave like matches at a much larger club and the remaining twelve or thirteen are genuinely obtainable, often at close to face value. Knowing which group your date falls into is the difference between planning early and paying more than you needed to.
Face value at Mainz is deliberately low and the club has never pretended otherwise. Single-match prices run from roughly €13 for the lowest standing category up to about €69 for premium seats in the highest category, with three categories applied across the fixture list depending on the opponent. By any comparison with the Premier League those are unusual numbers for top-flight football, and they are the reason the resale market here rarely reaches the multiples seen at bigger German clubs.
Resale ranges move with three things: which category the club has assigned the fixture, where in the ground the seat sits and how close to kick-off you buy. The Bayern and Frankfurt dates carry a premium that ordinary fixtures do not, and standing places carry a premium of their own simply because they are the lowest-priced stock in the building and the first to vanish. There is no European competition on the calendar this season, so the midweek premium that applied last winter does not exist.
The table below sets out typical ranges in pounds for the 2026/27 season. Treat them as a planning guide rather than a quote, because resale is a live market and the number you see today is not necessarily the number you see in March.
| Type of Ticket | Typical Price Range (GBP) |
|---|---|
| Bundesliga (standard fixtures) | £15 – £60 |
| Bundesliga (high-demand fixtures) | £45 – £150+ |
| DFB-Pokal | £20 – £75 |
| Hospitality / VIP | £150 – £400+ |
Prices reflect typical resale ranges and may change as demand and availability shift.
Yes. Membership at Mainz brings earlier access to sales rather than a gate you must pass through, and there is no ballot standing between the general public and an ordinary home fixture. For the twelve or thirteen mid-tier dates on the calendar, open sale genuinely means open sale, and a visitor with no connection to the club can buy a place in the ground without joining anything.
The exceptions are the ones you would expect. Bayern, Frankfurt, Dortmund and Schalke reach general sale with a fraction of the allocation intact, because more than 20,000 members have already been through the queue ahead of you. Standing places are a separate problem again, since the terrace is both the lowest-priced and the most sought-after part of the ground and it clears early regardless of who is visiting.
That is the gap resale fills. Members who cannot attend a particular fixture release their places into the market, and those places are available to anyone. It is worth joining if you live locally and plan to attend most weeks. It is not worth joining for a single trip, and you do not need to.
The Dauerkarte maths at Mainz is unusually persuasive. A standing season card in the Rheinhessen stand costs €199 for seventeen home league matches, which works out at well under €12 a game, and the least expensive seated cards start at €399. The club puts the saving against buying match by match at roughly 25 percent, and season cards renew automatically unless the holder cancels, which is why the base barely moves from year to year.
The consequence for a buyer is a thin resale pool relative to a club with a larger and more transient support. Fewer season card holders means fewer unused places entering the market each week. What that produces in practice is a two-speed picture: ordinary fixtures are easy to buy from the club and unremarkable on resale, while the four or five big dates are difficult everywhere and resale becomes the only route once the club's allocation is gone.
| Season Card Type | Typical Price (2026/27) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Standing, Rheinhessen stand | From £170 equivalent (€199) | Seventeen home league matches. The lowest entry price in the ground and the first category to sell out. |
| Seated, long sides | From £340 equivalent (€399) | Entry-level seated card. Position within the stand determines the exact price band. |
| Seated, central main stand | Higher bands on application | Halfway-line positions with the most even sightlines carry the top pricing. |
| Family blocks A and O | Bundled family pricing | Discounted adult and child combinations in designated family areas. |
| Concessions | Reduced across categories | Members, students, school pupils and children qualify for reduced rates. |
Prices reflect the club's published 2026/27 bands converted to pounds and may change.
The Mewa Arena is a single-tier bowl of four independent stands, joined only by a glazed facade and a promenade that runs the full way round. There is no upper deck to hide in and no running track to push the front rows back, so the difference between the most and least expensive place in the building is smaller here than at most Bundesliga grounds. What you are choosing between is atmosphere and sightline, not visibility.
| Stand / Area | Best For | Price Bracket | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rheinhessen stand (standing) | Atmosphere | Lowest | Home of the Q-Block and the Ultraszene Mainz, behind the goal. Part of the 13,700 standing places available for every league match. Unreserved, so arrival time decides where you end up. |
| Main stand, central blocks | Sightline and comfort | Highest | Halfway-line seating alongside the business areas, the media positions and the tunnel. The most even view of the pitch and the calmest section of the ground. |
| Opposite long side | Balance of view and price | Middle | Full-length view from the other touchline at a noticeably lower price than the main stand. The most sensible default for a first visit. |
| Corner sections | Value and availability | Lower to middle | Angled views that remain perfectly workable in a compact single-tier bowl. Usually the last blocks with stock for busy fixtures. |
| Family blocks A and O | Families with children | Bundled | Designated family areas with their own pricing and a quieter environment than the terrace end. |
| Wheelchair positions | Accessible access | Reduced | Dedicated positions with companion seating. Book directly through the club's access team well ahead of the fixture. |
Two points are worth knowing before you choose. Standing places are unreserved, so a terrace ticket buys you entry rather than a spot, and the good positions near the front go to people who arrive an hour early. And in a bowl this size the corner blocks are genuinely fine, which is not true at every ground that sells them as a budget option.
Mainz take a modest following on the road by Bundesliga standards, which is what you would expect from a club drawing on a city of 220,000 rather than a metropolitan region. The practical upside for a buyer is real: away allocations are rarely oversubscribed for ordinary fixtures, and places tend to remain available closer to matchday than they would for a club with a following that fills every allocation automatically.
The exceptions are the short trips. Frankfurt is thirty-five kilometres away, Hoffenheim and Stuttgart are comfortable day returns and Köln is under two hours by rail. Those allocations do sell, and they sell to people who have been going for years rather than to casual buyers.
| Away Detail | What to Expect |
|---|---|
| Typical allocation | German league rules provide visiting clubs with up to 10 percent of capacity, which ranges from around 3,000 at the smaller grounds to more than 7,000 at Signal Iduna Park. Mainz do not always take the full quota. |
| Where you will be | Almost always a segregated block behind a goal or in a corner, usually with a standing section in German grounds that still have terracing. Sightlines vary considerably from ground to ground. |
| Access requirements | No membership card or fan ID is needed for Bundesliga away fixtures. Some clubs restrict away sales to their own registered supporters for high-risk games, which is where resale becomes the practical route. |
| Transport | Match tickets on many German fixtures include regional public transport on the day. Check the specific club's terms, because the scheme and the network vary by federal state. |
| Timing on the day | Away sections open earlier and empty later than home stands, and visiting supporters can be held inside for 15 to 30 minutes after high-risk fixtures. Build that into any train booked for the same evening. |
The honest answer at the Mewa Arena is that there is no bad place to watch football, so the decision is about what kind of afternoon you want rather than about whether you will see the game. The table below matches the common priorities to the block that actually serves them.
| Priority | Best Option | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Best atmosphere | Rheinhessen stand, standing | The Q-Block sets the singing and the choreography for the whole ground. Everything you have read about German terrace culture happens here, and it costs less than a seat. |
| Best view | Main stand, central blocks | Halfway line, elevated enough to read the shape of both teams, close enough to hear the contact. The premium is modest by Bundesliga standards. |
| Family-friendly | Family blocks A and O | Designated family areas with bundled pricing, away from the terrace end and the away section. Sensible for a first match with children. |
| Premium experience | Business seats or a skybox | Around 2,100 business seats sit at the main stand with roughly 650 places across the skyboxes. Catering, parking and a warm room before and after. |
| Lower-priced option | Corner blocks or standing | The corners hold their price down without costing you much of the view, and the terrace is the lowest entry point into top-flight German football anywhere in the division. |
The ground opened on 3 July 2011 at the Europakreisel on the western edge of the city, replacing the Bruchwegstadion that had housed the club since 1928. It cost around €60 million against an initial projection of €40 million, and it was built specifically to solve the problem that had followed Mainz through their first Bundesliga era: a stadium too small and too old for top-flight football. Seats at the Mewa Arena have been the club's main constraint and its main asset ever since.
Architecturally it is more interesting than most modern German grounds. Four separate stands sit as independent structures, tied together only by a glass skin and a continuous promenade, and each is enclosed from the outside by a heavy red frame that is lit at night. The effect from the approach road is of four illuminated boxes rather than a single bowl, which is unusual and rather good. Inside, the single tier means every row is closer to the pitch than the capacity would suggest.
Capacity is 33,305 for league football, of which 13,700 are standing places. For matches played under competition rules that require an all-seated configuration, the terraces convert and the figure falls to around 27,000. That conversion mattered last season during the Conference League run and does not this season, since Mainz are not in European competition in 2026/27.
The Rheinhessen stand behind one goal is the heart of it. The Q-Block, which takes its name from the fan section at the old Bruchwegstadion, moved across the city with the club, and the Ultraszene Mainz founded in 2001 still organises the singing and the tifo from there. Away supporters go in blocks H to J behind the opposite goal, with an allocation of around 3,500 for a full Bundesliga following. The arrangement keeps the two ends apart without dampening either.
Getting there is easier than the out-of-town location suggests. From Mainz Hauptbahnhof the ride takes ten to fifteen minutes on bus routes serving the stadium, with additional shuttle services running in both directions on matchdays. The admission ticket doubles as a pass on the regional RMV network on the day of the game, which makes the train from Frankfurt or Wiesbaden the obvious way in. Around 3,500 parking spaces exist at the ground, but Mainz operates an environmental zone and the roads around the Europakreisel congest badly, so driving is the least attractive option.
The area immediately around the arena is a business park rather than a neighbourhood, so the pre-match hours belong to the Altstadt. Mainz has a proper old town with a cathedral, a Gutenberg museum and a drinking culture built around Rheinhessen wine rather than beer, and the walk from the centre to the ground is not one you want to attempt, which is exactly why the shuttle exists. Eat and drink in town, then take the bus out. If you want to see how the blocks sit relative to one another before you buy, the Mewa Arena seating plan lays out the four stands and the standing areas.
One matchday routine is worth arriving for. After every Mainz goal the ground plays the Narrhallamarsch, the carnival tune that has accompanied Fastnacht processions in this city for the better part of two centuries. It is not a marketing invention and nobody treats it as a novelty. It is simply what happens, and it tells you more about the club than any amount of published history.
Hospitality at Mainz is modest in scale and sensibly priced, which follows from the size of the ground and the club's general approach to what it charges. There are roughly 2,100 business seats concentrated in the main stand, with around 650 further places distributed across the skyboxes, and the packages are built around catering and a warm room rather than around spectacle.
What you get for the money is a padded seat on the halfway line, food and drink before the match and at half time and parking that saves you the walk from the shuttle. For a corporate group or a special occasion the value is straightforward. For a supporter who mainly wants to be in the ground, the terrace at a fraction of the cost is the better purchase and nobody at this club would tell you otherwise.
| Package | What It Includes | Typical Price Range (GBP) |
|---|---|---|
| Business seat | Padded main stand seat, access to a business lounge before and after the match, catering and a dedicated entrance. | £150 – £280 per person |
| Business seat with parking | The above plus a reserved parking space at the ground, which removes the shuttle from your day entirely. | £200 – £330 per person |
| Skybox place | A seat within a private box with in-box catering and service, plus a viewing balcony over the main stand. | £280 – £450+ per person |
| Full skybox hire | Exclusive use of a box for a group, with catering arranged to the party's requirements. | Quoted per fixture and party size |
| Matchday lounge | Lounge access with a seated ticket, a buffet and a bar, at a lower entry point than the business seat tiers. | £120 – £200 per person |
Hospitality ranges reflect typical resale and package pricing and may change with fixture category and availability.
The process below takes a few minutes and removes most of the ways a resale purchase goes wrong. The single most useful habit is reading the listing notes properly before you commit, because that is where delivery method, seat restrictions and any collection requirement are set out.
Step1
Find your fixture
Use the home and away lists at the foot of this page to reach the exact match you want. Each fixture has its own page, so you are looking at listings for that date rather than at the club as a whole.
Step2
Set up your account
You can create an account before or during checkout. Doing it first means your delivery details are already stored when a listing you want appears, which matters when stock for a big fixture moves quickly.
Step3
Decide standing or seated first
This is the decision that shapes everything else at the Mewa Arena. Standing in the Rheinhessen stand is unreserved and atmospheric. A seat on the main stand or the opposite side gives you a fixed position and a better view of the shape of the game.
Step4
Filter by quantity before price
If you need three or four places together, filter for that first. Sorting by price and then discovering the listing only holds two is the most common wasted step, and split seats in a single-tier bowl can end up a long way apart.
Step5
Read the listing notes in full
The notes specify the delivery method, the expected timing, whether the ticket is name-bound and any restriction on the seat. Two listings at the same price can behave completely differently on matchday because of what is written here.
Step6
Check the total before you commit
The checkout total includes any service and delivery charges, so compare listings on that figure rather than on the headline. A slightly higher listing with a faster delivery method is often the better purchase.
Step7
Pay and confirm
Enter your payment details on the encrypted checkout page and confirm the order. An order reference and a confirmation email arrive immediately, and the 150% guarantee applies from that moment rather than from delivery.
Step8
Follow it through to delivery
Use track order with your reference to see where the ticket is. German clubs frequently release digital tickets in the final week before kick-off, so a quiet period after purchase is normal rather than a warning sign.
Once the ticket is in hand the remaining work is logistical. Check whether your ticket carries RMV travel validity, decide how early you want to be inside if you are standing and plan the return trip around the possibility of being held back after a high-profile fixture.
Mainz 05 tickets separate into two clear groups by fixture, and the gap between them is wider than at most clubs in the division. Knowing which group your date belongs to tells you whether to book now or wait.
| Fixture Type | Why It Moves Fast |
|---|---|
| Bayern Munich | The top category fixture and the only certain sell-out on the calendar. Bayern's travelling support, regional neutrals and the club's own membership queue exhaust the allocation before general sale meaningfully opens. |
| Eintracht Frankfurt | Thirty-five kilometres between the grounds and a Frankfurt following that fills its allocation instantly. Local demand and visiting demand peak simultaneously, which no other fixture on the list does. |
| Borussia Dortmund | A large travelling support and a fixture that carries residue from the final day of 2022/23. Dortmund sell out away allocations everywhere and Mainz is one of the more attractive trips on their calendar. |
| Schalke and the promoted clubs | Schalke are back in the top flight with a following far larger than any allocation can hold, and Elversberg and Paderborn are novelty fixtures. Matches that have not happened in years generate their own demand. |
| Standing places, any fixture | The 13,700 terrace places are the lowest-priced stock in the ground and clear first regardless of opponent. If you want to stand, buy early even for an ordinary Saturday. |
German clubs have moved decisively to digital delivery and Mainz are no exception, but resale listings still cover several formats depending on how the original ticket was issued. The listing notes tell you which applies before you buy.
Whichever route applies, read the notes before you commit. They set out the method, the expected timing and any identification requirement, and they are the difference between walking straight in and standing outside explaining yourself.
Gates open two hours before kick-off for Bundesliga matches. If you are standing in the Rheinhessen stand this is not optional advice, because the terrace is unreserved and the positions with a clear view and room to move go to the people who walk in first. Anyone with a reserved seat has more latitude, though the shuttle from the Hauptbahnhof runs at capacity in the final forty-five minutes and the queue for it is longer than the ride.
The other reason to be early is that the ground itself is worth seeing before it fills. Four separate stands lit from outside, a promenade that runs the full circumference and a terrace that assembles its choreography in stages. Turning up at five to three means missing all of it.
Ordinary Bundesliga fixtures do not require photographic identification for entry. High-risk matches occasionally attract additional conditions, and name-bound tickets do exist for certain categories, in which case the listing will state the requirement clearly and you should carry the document named on it.
Mobile entry is now standard. Charge your phone, add the pass to your wallet in advance rather than at the gate and take a screenshot of the barcode as insurance against a dead signal. If you are entering as a group, agree a meeting point inside rather than outside, because the promenade is far easier to move around than the approach roads.
Bags larger than A4 format are refused and the restriction is applied at the outer perimeter rather than at the turnstile, so arriving with a rucksack means a walk back to wherever you can leave it. Storage at the ground is limited and the location makes an improvised solution difficult, which is a stronger argument here than at a city-centre stadium.
Prohibited items follow the standard German list: bottles, cans, flares, large flags on poles, professional camera equipment and anything that could be used as a projectile. Travel out with nothing bigger than a small shoulder bag and the entry process takes seconds.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Full name | 1. Fußball- und Sportverein Mainz 05 e.V. |
| Founded | 1905 |
| Nicknames | Die Nullfünfer (The 05ers), Karnevalsverein |
| Stadium | Mewa Arena, capacity 33,305 including 13,700 standing places |
| Head coach | Urs Fischer, appointed 7 December 2025 |
| Captain | Silvan Widmer |
| League | Bundesliga |
| Members | More than 20,000 |
Mainz spent ninety-nine years not being a Bundesliga club. They were founded in 1905, played in regional leagues for most of the twentieth century, dropped to amateur football in the early 1980s and they were still in the second tier when the Berlin Wall came down. What happened between 1995 and 2011 turned them from a provincial second-division side into a club that exports coaches to the largest jobs in Europe, and it happened without money.
The first eight decades produced nothing that would predict what followed. Mainz were a competent regional side in a region full of them, overshadowed by Kaiserslautern to the west and Frankfurt to the east, and their descent into amateur football in the late 1970s reflected finances rather than ambition. The amateur championship of 1982 is a real honour and it is also a reminder of how far the club had fallen. When the Bundesliga was formed in 1963, Mainz were not remotely in the conversation.
Wolfgang Frank is the most consequential figure in this club's history and most people outside Germany have never heard of him. He arrived at a struggling second-division side in 1995 and abandoned the sweeper system that every German team then played, replacing it with a flat back four, zonal marking and a pressing structure borrowed from Arrigo Sacchi's Milan. In German football at the time this was close to heresy.
It worked, and more importantly it was taught. The players who learned it under Frank included a limited but intelligent defender named Jürgen Klopp, who had converted from striker in 1995 and would later say that Frank showed him football could be organised rather than merely played. Frank left in 2000 and died in 2013. The line that runs from his Mainz teams through Klopp and Thomas Tuchel into half the coaching appointments in modern European football starts on a training pitch at the Bruchwegstadion in front of a few hundred people.
Klopp took over in February 2001 with the club fighting relegation and stayed for seven years, which makes him Mainz's longest-serving manager with a record of 109 wins, 78 draws and 83 defeats. The two failed promotions before the successful one are part of the story rather than a footnote. Losing on the final day in the 93rd minute, in the second consecutive season of near-misses, is the kind of thing that breaks clubs. Mainz went up the following year.
Europe arrived by an unusual route. Mainz were nominated for the 2005/06 UEFA Cup through the Fair Play draw, which rewards disciplinary record rather than league position, and because the Bruchwegstadion did not meet the criteria they played their home ties at Frankfurt's ground. They beat Mika of Armenia and Keflavík of Iceland before losing 2-0 on aggregate to Sevilla, who went on to win the competition. It remains one of the more charming European qualifications in Bundesliga history.
Tuchel inherited a newly promoted side and turned it into something that had no business existing at this budget. The 2010/11 season opened with seven straight wins that matched a Bundesliga record standing since 1965 and finished fifth, which remains the club's highest placing and its first European qualification earned on the pitch rather than through the Fair Play draw. He left in 2014 and went on to win trophies at Dortmund, Paris and Chelsea, taking the Champions League in 2021.
What followed was fifteen years of a specific kind of instability: good seasons, bad seasons, coaches who arrived promising and left within eighteen months and an almost annual relegation scare resolved somewhere in the spring. Bo Svensson provided three years of calm from 2021. Bo Henriksen produced the recovery of 2023/24 and the sixth-place finish of 2024/25, then lost twelve of his first thirteen matches the following season and was dismissed on 3 December 2025.
The Fischer months that followed are the reason anyone outside Rheinhessen was talking about Mainz last spring. A club bottom of the Bundesliga with six points in December finished tenth on forty, and simultaneously topped a Conference League group, beat Sigma Olomouc in the round of sixteen and won the home leg of a quarter-final against Strasbourg 2-0 before losing 4-0 in Alsace. Two campaigns that should have pulled against each other instead ran in parallel.
Mainz has produced few great players and an extraordinary number of great football minds. The list below reflects that. It is heavier on coaches and administrators than a comparable list at any other Bundesliga club, and that is the accurate picture rather than an editorial choice.
| Legend | Role | Contribution | Milestones |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wolfgang Frank | Head coach, 1995 to 1997 and 1998 to 2000 | Abandoned the sweeper system that dominated German football and installed a flat back four with zonal marking and Sacchi-style pressing at a second-division club. The idea spread outwards from Mainz through the players he taught it to. He is credited with inspiring a generation of German coaches and he never managed in the Bundesliga with this club. | Two spells, one tactical revolution, a direct line to Klopp and Löw |
| Jürgen Klopp | Player 1990 to 2001, head coach 2001 to 2008 | Spent eleven years as a player, converting from striker to defender in 1995 before retiring as the club's record goalscorer with 56 goals. Took over as head coach in February 2001 and delivered the first Bundesliga promotion in the club's history in 2004, keeping a side with the smallest budget and smallest ground in the division up for two seasons. | Club record goalscorer, longest-serving manager, 109 wins from 270 matches |
| Christian Heidel | Sporting director, 1992 to 2016 and from December 2020 | Ran the club's football operation for twenty-four years, initially without payment while running a car dealership. Appointed Frank, Klopp and Tuchel, which is a hit rate no comparable executive in Germany can claim, and built a recruitment model based on identifying coaches rather than buying players. | Appointed three coaches who reshaped German football |
| Thomas Tuchel | Head coach, 2009 to 2014 | Took a newly promoted side and produced the two highest points totals in the club's Bundesliga history. The 2010/11 season opened with seven consecutive wins that equalled a record set in 1965 and ended in fifth place and a first European qualification earned through league performance. | Fifth in 2010/11, Europa League qualification, later a Champions League winner elsewhere |
| Nikolče Noveski | Defender, 2005 to 2014 | Made more than 300 league appearances across nine years, captained the side through the 2009/10 season and played in the 2005/06 UEFA Cup campaign. Also holds a share of the Bundesliga record for own goals with six, which he has always discussed with more humour than most players would manage. | 300-plus league appearances, club captain, UEFA Cup participant |
| Stefan Bell | Defender, from 2010 | Came through the club's own system and has spent his entire senior career in Mainz colours across two Bundesliga eras, several relegation fights and four different head coaches in one season. Passed 250 Bundesliga appearances for the club and remains in the squad for 2026/27 in his mid-thirties. | Club record appearance holder, one-club career |
| Karim Onisiwo | Forward, 2016 to 2025 | Arrived from Austria as a squad player and stayed nine years, becoming the club's leading scorer in Bundesliga football with 32 goals. Never a prolific striker in any single season, which is precisely the point: the record belongs to persistence rather than to a purple patch. | Club's Bundesliga scoring record with 32 goals |
Mainz have never won a major senior trophy and this page is not going to pretend the amateur titles are equivalent. What the club has instead is a record of surviving in the top flight on a budget that should not permit it, a coaching lineage that has shaped European football and one European campaign earned through good behaviour. The honest ledger looks like this.
| Competition | Titles |
|---|---|
| Bundesliga | 0 (best finish: fifth, 2010/11) |
| DFB-Pokal | 0 (best run: semi-final, 2008/09) |
| 2. Bundesliga | 0 (promoted 2003/04 and 2008/09) |
| German amateur championship | 1 (1982) |
| Oberliga Südwest | 3 (1981, 1988, 1990) |
| South West Cup | 3 (1980, 1982, 1986) |
| German U19 championship | 2 (2009, 2023) |
| European competition | 0 (best run: Conference League quarter-final, 2025/26) |
The two U19 championships deserve more attention than they usually get. A club this size winning the national youth title twice in fifteen years tells you where the money goes and why the first team keeps producing players it did not have to buy.
Mainz do not have a rivalry in the sense that Dortmund and Schalke have one. What they have is a set of fixtures that carry weight for specific and different reasons: one geographic, one historic and one that exists because of a single afternoon.
Thirty-five kilometres of the Rhine-Main region separate the two grounds, which makes this the closest thing Mainz have to a conventional derby and the fixture that most reliably fills both allocations. Frankfurt are the larger club by every measure, with a European trophy, a bigger stadium and a support that travels in numbers Mainz cannot match, and the asymmetry is part of what gives the fixture its edge. For Mainz supporters, beating Frankfurt is worth considerably more than three points; for Frankfurt, losing to Mainz is an indignity that lasts until the return fixture. There is also the awkward footnote that Mainz played their 2005/06 UEFA Cup home ties in Frankfurt's stadium because their own ground was not up to standard, which nobody in either fanbase has entirely forgotten.
The Südwest derby is the older rivalry and the one with more history, even though the two clubs have rarely met in the top flight in recent years. Kaiserslautern are the traditional power of Rhineland-Palatinate with four German championships and a European pedigree, and for decades Mainz were the smaller neighbour operating in their shadow. The relationship inverted in the 2000s when Mainz established themselves in the Bundesliga while Kaiserslautern fell through the divisions, and the fixture now carries the particular tension of a rivalry where the historic pecking order and the current one point in opposite directions. It is a cup draw or a second-tier meeting rather than a league fixture at present, which is exactly why both sets of supporters want it.
Not a rivalry by any traditional measure, but a fixture that acquired real meaning on 27 May 2023. Dortmund needed to beat Mainz at Signal Iduna Park to win the Bundesliga for the first time since 2012, went two goals down inside a quarter of an hour, and could only draw 2-2 as Bayern took the title on goal difference. Eighty thousand people watched a title slip away in real time and Mainz were the side standing in the middle of it. Every subsequent meeting between the two carries a trace of that afternoon, and it is one of the few occasions in modern Bundesliga history when a mid-table club decided the championship.
The 2005/06 UEFA Cup tie is the club's first European memory and it ended the way most people expected. Mainz had reached the competition through the Fair Play draw rather than through results, played their home leg in Frankfurt because the Bruchwegstadion did not meet the standard, and lost 2-0 on aggregate to a Sevilla side that went on to win the competition and then win it again the following year. For a club that had been in the second division two years earlier, being eliminated by the eventual champions was not a humiliation. It was a marker of where the ceiling sat.
Twenty years later the ceiling had moved. The Conference League quarter-final of April 2026 produced the finest European night the Mewa Arena has staged, a 2-0 win over Strasbourg in front of a converted 27,000-capacity ground, followed a week later by a 4-0 defeat in Alsace that ended the run 4-2 on aggregate. The two legs were separated by 180 kilometres and about as wide a gap in performance as a knockout tie can contain. Ask a Mainz supporter about Europe and the first leg is where the conversation starts.
| Season | Summary |
|---|---|
| 2021/22 | Eighth place on 46 points under Bo Svensson, the club's best finish in a decade at that point and a campaign built on defensive organisation rather than goals. Svensson had arrived in January 2021 with the side bottom and effectively doomed, kept them up and then produced a season that flirted with European qualification into the spring. The DFB-Pokal ended early and the league form was the whole story. |
| 2022/23 | Ninth on 46 points in a season remembered almost entirely for its final ninety minutes. Mainz travelled to Signal Iduna Park on the last day, led Dortmund 2-0 inside fifteen minutes and held on for a 2-2 draw that handed Bayern the title on goal difference. For a club with no trophies of its own, deciding somebody else's is a peculiar sort of achievement and it is treated as one. |
| 2023/24 | Thirteenth on 35 points after the worst first half of a season the club had produced in years. Svensson departed in November, Bo Henriksen arrived in February 2024 with Mainz seventeenth and holding two wins from twenty-five matches, and the side then went unbeaten in the final nine and won five of them. Survival was secured with a margin nobody expected in January. |
| 2024/25 | Sixth on 52 points and qualification for the Conference League, the club's first European campaign earned on the pitch since 2011. Mainz sat third in late March before a seven-match winless run cost them a Champions League place and very nearly cost them Europe altogether. Jonathan Burkardt scored 19 across all competitions, and the DFB-Pokal ended in a 4-0 home defeat to Bayern in the second round on 30 October. |
| 2025/26 | Tenth on 40 points after the most extreme two-part season in the club's history. Henriksen was dismissed on 3 December with Mainz bottom on six points from thirteen matches, Urs Fischer was appointed on 7 December on a contract to 2028, and the side took 34 points from the remaining 21 games. Simultaneously they topped their Conference League group, beat Sigma Olomouc in the round of sixteen and reached the quarter-final, where Strasbourg won 4-2 on aggregate. Nadiem Amiri finished with 17 goals in all competitions and Stuttgart ended the Pokal run in the second round. |
Fischer starts his first full season with the group that produced the second half of last season largely intact and with a recruitment strategy that has leaned towards Bundesliga-proven players rather than speculative signings. Silvan Widmer captains from right-back, Nadiem Amiri remains the creative reference point after his seventeen-goal season while Stefan Bell is into a seventeenth year at the club. Values below are approximate market valuations converted to pounds and shift with form, age and contract length.
| No. | Player | Position | Value (£) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alexander Schwolow | Goalkeeper | 1.2m |
| 2 | Phillipp Mwene | Defender | 2.5m |
| 3 | Fabio Gruber | Defender | 4.0m |
| 4 | Stefan Posch | Defender | 6.5m |
| 5 | Eric Martel | Midfielder | 7.0m |
| 6 | Kaishū Sano | Midfielder | 8.5m |
| 7 | Lee Jae-sung | Midfielder | 5.0m |
| 8 | Paul Nebel | Midfielder | 9.0m |
| 9 | Phillip Tietz | Forward | 7.5m |
| 10 | Nadiem Amiri | Midfielder | 11.0m |
| 11 | Ransford Königsdörffer | Forward | 5.5m |
| 13 | Hong Hyun-seok | Midfielder | 6.0m |
| 14 | William Bøving | Forward | 4.5m |
| 15 | Lennard Maloney | Midfielder | 4.0m |
| 16 | Stefan Bell | Defender | 0.6m |
| 17 | Benedict Hollerbach | Forward | 8.0m |
| 19 | Anthony Caci | Defender | 4.5m |
| 23 | Sheraldo Becker | Forward | 4.0m |
| 25 | Andreas Hanche-Olsen | Defender | 4.5m |
| 27 | Robin Zentner | Goalkeeper | 3.5m |
| 30 | Silvan Widmer (captain) | Defender | 2.0m |
| 31 | Dominik Kohr | Defender | 1.5m |
Market values are approximate, drawn from public valuation data and rounded. They are a guide to squad structure rather than a statement of transfer fees.
No. Membership brings earlier access to sales rather than exclusive rights, and there is no ballot for ordinary home fixtures. For the four or five biggest dates the membership queue exhausts most of the allocation, which is when the resale market becomes the practical route.
Around 13,700 of the 33,305 places are standing and they are unreserved, so your ticket admits you to the terrace rather than to a specific spot. Supporters who want a position near the front are inside well over an hour before kick-off, and gates open two hours early.
The club prices deliberately low and says so publicly, with season cards from €199 standing and €399 seated for seventeen home league matches. A high proportion of standing capacity keeps the entry point down, and filling a 33,305-capacity ground matters more here than maximising revenue per place.
Most German league tickets are digital and release in the final week before kick-off, so a quiet period after purchase is normal rather than a problem. Every listing states its delivery method and expected timing before you commit, and postal options need noticeably more lead time.
Bus routes serving the stadium take ten to fifteen minutes from the main station, with extra shuttle services in both directions on matchdays. Your match ticket doubles as a pass on the regional RMV network that day, which makes rail from Frankfurt or Wiesbaden the sensible approach.
1BoxOffice is a verified marketplace that has been connecting supporters with live event seats since 2006, and every confirmed order carries a 150% money-back guarantee. Whether you want the Frankfurt derby or one of the lowest-priced terrace places in European top-flight football, compare the listings above and secure your place while the block you want still has stock.
Sources: 1. FSV Mainz 05 official club website (mainz05.de) for season card pricing, membership figures, coaching appointments and ticket information, the Deutsche Fußball Liga and Bundesliga.
Our benefits
We provide our customers with top-tier resources, infrastructure and support.
Join NowWe have been online helping fans for more than 20+ years.
We use high levels of data encryption here and do not share your data with any third party vendors!
All tickets are guaranteed to be delivered on time so you don’t miss the events!
Your tickets are guaranteed no matter what.
Providing your audience with a secure and reliable experience.
Ensuring clear communication and collaboration.
74
751+
965+
20+