Matchday 1's biggest hits

Take a deeper look into the history of the Bundesliga's opening weekend to see what trends you should have your eyes on in 2025/26...

• After their 8-0 thumping of Schalke on Matchday 1 of 2020/21, it probably comes as no surprise to learn that Bayern have the strongest opening-day record of all Bundesliga clubs, with an average of over 2.15 points per game.
• Bayern have also won a league-best 39 of their Matchday 1 fixtures, scored a record 147 goals and topped the opening-day table more than any other club (13 times). VfB Stuttgart are next, heading the overall post-Matchday 1 standings on nine occasions.
• Defending champions have won their Matchday 1 fixtures in 36 out of 62 seasons (D14, L12), scoring 145 goals and conceding 74 times.

Watch: Harry Kane opened his Bundesliga account the last time Bayern kicked off a campaign

• The team that has finished Matchday 1 in second place has gone on to be relegated just as often as winning the league (both seven times).
• The Matchday 1 leader has ended the season as champions on 13 occasions, and - statistically - has the best chance of doing so. The third-placed team has triumphed 10 times; only a team that was 11th, 15th or 18th has never gone on to win the title. A team sitting 17th after the first game has done so three times, however.
• No champion has ever lost an official opening game (since 2002), boasting a record of 18 wins and five draws and an aggregate score of 70-20.
• The last team to lose on Matchday 1 but go on to win the title was Borussia Dortmund in 2010/11. They were beaten 2-0 by Bayer Leverkusen.
• The only team to ever beat the defending champions on Matchday 1 and then go on to win the title themselves was Kaiserslautern in 1997/98. They got a 1-0 victory at Bayern as they became the only promoted team to ever win the Bundesliga.
• Bayern had suffered the heaviest opening-day defeat on record when they lost 6-0 away to Kickers Offenbach in 1974/75 (as champions), before beating Werder Bremen by the same scoreline in 2016/17. The Munich club then rewrote the record books in 2020/21 when they smashed Schalke 8-0.
• The heaviest opening-day home defeat for a champion was Nuremberg's 4-1 loss at the hands of Aachen in 1968/69.

Watch: Xabi Alonso scored a veritable rocket as Bayern launched themselves into 2016/17

• A total of 154 teams have been relegated over the course of the past 62 Bundesliga seasons. Around a fifth of the teams in question (21 percent) began the season with a win; 53 percent avoided defeat.
• Fifty-nine of the 154 teams promoted to the Bundesliga since 1964 have suffered an immediate relegation to the second tier (38 percent).
• Four teams that topped the Matchday 1 standings have been relegated: Hansa Rostock (1991/92), Karlsruhe (1997/98), Borussia Mönchengladbach (1998/99) and Arminia Bielefeld (2002/03).
• Rostock's 4-0 win over Nuremberg in 1991 was the biggest opening victory by a team that ended up being relegated.
• On the flip side, 84 teams that occupied a place in the bottom two after Matchday 1 avoided relegation come the end of the season. But 20 teams starting in the bottom two have gone down, while it's 32 teams sitting 16th, 17th or 18th.

• Bayern and Bremen have started more Bundesliga seasons than any other clubs, with this going to be their 61st campaigns.
• Werder have suffered more Matchday 1 defeats than any other current top-flight club (23).
• Bremen have conceded the highest number of Matchday 1 goals (101); Bayern have been involved in games with the most goals (205).
• No current Bundesliga team has drawn on opening weekend as often as Gladbach (19).
• The record number of Matchday 1 goals fell in 1986/87 (42). By contrast, 15 goals represents the lowest-scoring start to a season (2017/18).

• A Bayern player has scored the first goal of a season a league-leading 18 times. Dortmund are next (eight players), followed by Duisburg (four).
• The 2020/21 season was the first to see two players score hat-tricks in Matchday 1, with Serge Gnabry and Andrej Kramarić.
• The team record for goals by substitutes on Matchday 1 is two, achieved 12 times. Jamie Gittens hit a brace off the bench for Dortmund to beat Eintracht Frankfurt 2-0 in 2024/25.
• The record average attendance on Matchday 1 was set in 2011 - 51,344 - when Bayern, Dortmund and Hertha Berlin were all playing at home.
• Hertha are the only promoted team to have scored six goals on Matchday 1, beating Frankfurt 6-1 in 2013/14. 
• Lewandowski has featured in more successive Matchday 1 wins than any player in Bundesliga history (eight from 2011 to 2018).
• It took Union Berlin three seasons to open a Bundesliga campaign with a point. Their 1-1 draw with Leverkusen in 2021/22 followed a 4-0 loss to RB Leipzig in their debut match and a 3-1 defeat at home to Augsburg in 2020/21.