FC Bayern and Borussia Dortmund meet on Saturday night at 20.30 Uhr in the Franz-Beckenbauer-Cup, with the first title of the new season on the line. Because Bayern won both the league and the cup last season, the BVB step in as the opponent.
The match will be shown live on Sat1, with Sky and Magenta TV also carrying the game. The winner will lift the Franz-Beckenbauer-Cup, a trophy that stands 53 centimeters tall and weighs 5.5 kilograms.
The final has arrived before either side would normally want it. Bayern and Dortmund had a shorter preseason than usual, and that shows in the squad news: Jamal Musiala will sit out Bayern’s first competitive game of the new campaign after two collapses in the last two friendlies. Serge Gnabry and Lennart Karl are also not in the squad because they are still behind on fitness.
That leaves Bayern with a sharper test than the calendar suggests. In six warm-up matches they lost only once, 1:2 at Wehen Wiesbaden, while Dortmund come in after two 0:1 defeats, against FC Tokyo and Cerezo Osaka. The balance of the game is not only about a trophy; it is also about which side has handled a compressed build-up better.
Daniel Schlager will referee the match, with Sven Waschitzki-Günther and Tobias Fritsch as assistants. Timo Gerach is the fourth official, while Johann Pfeifer and Markus Sinn are the video assistants. Jürgen Klopp is also expected to be in the stadium for the first time on the stand as new national coach, adding another layer to a night that already feels like a first checkpoint rather than a routine curtain-raiser.
The prize money has not yet been announced officially. Last year Bayern received around 3 million euro for beating VfB Stuttgart, but for now the only certainty is the trophy itself and the fact that one of these teams will start the season with silverware in hand.
