There is no doubt that Bayern Munich is one of the best teams in Europe and indeed the world. Only a small handful of other teams have the history of the Bavarians, while even fewer sides can surpass it. In order for a club to have such a rich history, needless to say, they must have had great players through the years and the generations. That of course includes players who can put the ball into the back of the net.
In Bayern’s case, the numbers in terms of its best five goal scorers vary, but for the purpose of this article, we will use the statistics provided by the Transfermakt.de website, which is a highly trusted source, not only in terms of transfer deals but also player and club statistics. Without further ado, here is the top five Bayern goal scores list.
Bayern Munch All-Time Top Five Goal Scorers in Detail
5th Place: (217 Goals) Karl-Heinz Rummenigge
Karl-Heinz, “Kalle” Rummenigge is of course very well-known to the younger generation of fans for his different roles as CEO and club vice-president long before that. After the 2022/23 season, he even came out of retirement to join the Bayern supervisory board. But before his career as a club administrator in those various roles in which he served and indeed shaped Bayern into the great global brand that it is today, he served them on the pitch as a quite clinical goal scorer.
He played for the German record champions from 1974 to 1984. In that time, he won two Bundesliga titles, two German Cups, two European Cups, as well as the 1976 Intercontinental Cup. Beyond that, he won the 1980 European Championships with the West German national team.
4th Place: (223 Goals) Rainer Ohlhauser
The answer is Rainer Ohlhauser! pic.twitter.com/sGMPlKaLwn
— 🇺🇸 FC Bayern US 🇨🇦 (@FCBayernUS) February 17, 2017
Rainer Ohlhauser is the only one on this top five Bayern goal scores list who is not widely known to football fans around the world. That is due to the fact that he was at the club before it became famous. Ohlhauser played for Bayern from 1961 to 1970.
Nonetheless, he was part of the team that achieved promotion to the Bundesliga in 1965, he won his lone German league title in 1969 along with three German Cup trophies and the European Cup Winner’s Cup title of 1967. All in all, it was a highly decorated career, which he built on in Switzerland with Grasshoppers Zurich and FC Wintertuhr.
3rd Place: (235 Goals) Thomas Muller
Thomas Muller is the only present-day Bayern player in (or for that matter anywhere near the top five goal scorers list). His first full season in the first team was in 2009/10. Since then, he has won 12 Bundesliga titles, six German Cups, two UEFA Champions Leagues, and two Club World Cups. He also won the 2014 World Cup with the German national team.
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Despite the fact that now at age 33, he is beginning to struggle for minutes as a starter under coach Thomas Tuchel, he remains an integral part of the Bayern Munich setup. As a one-club man for all his career to this point, he has earned the fans’ admiration like no other current member of the squad. He truly is Mr. Bayern Munich and as a Bavarian native all the more so.
2nd Place: (344 Goals) Robert Lewandowski
Robert Lewandowski is the only non-German player to make the top five. If we say that the clubs’ Golden Age was the generation that won the European Cup (the predecessor competition to the UEFA Champions League) three times in a row in the mid-1970s, then Lewandowski was part of the generation that came closest to it, while some may insist that they even surpassed it.
Bayern of course never managed to repeat the three European crowns back-to-back they had won earlier, but they were far more dominant domestically in Germany, than they could dream of being back then. Also, there is an argument to be made that winning the European Cup in the 70s was a far easier task than doing so in the UEFA Champions League today. Comparing players and teams from different eras is unfair and difficult anyway.
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Back to Lewandowski, he played for Bayern from 2014 to 2022 and won the Bundesliga in all eight seasons he played there. In that time period, he also won three German Cups, the 2020 UEFA Champions League and the 2021 Club World Cup. In 2021, he also broke Gerd Muller’s single-season Bundesliga goalscoring record with 41 goals that term. A year later, he controversially forced his transfer to Barcelona, although he has since apologized to the club and its fans for his behaviour leading up to the move. Despite whatever hurt feelings the Bavarian faithful still may have toward the Polish star, there is no doubt that his on-field performances merit his special place in team history.
1st: (568 Goals) Gerd Muller
Thomas Muller holds up the shirt of legendary goalscorer Gerd Muller, who died this past weekend 🙏 pic.twitter.com/hw6bAxDW0R
— B/R Football (@brfootball) August 17, 2021
Gerd Muller is the greatest German striker to date and the greatest goalscorer in the Bavarian’s long history by a large margin. He played for the side from 1964 to 1979. This spans from its promotion into the Bundesliga in 1965, to the team winning the European Cup three times in a row, from 1974 to 1976 as noted above. Apart from that, he won four Bundesliga titles, four German Cups, the 1967 European Cup Winner’s Cup, as well as the 1976 Intercontinental Cup.
With the West German national team, he triumphed in the 1972 European Championships and the 1974 World Cup, winning the latter on home soil. He scored crucial goals along the way, such as the winner of the 1974 World Cup final in Munich against the Netherlands.
He was quite short and had a stocky build as well as an incredibly low centre of gravity, which made his goals look more clumsy than graceful, but he was a true goalscoring machine nonetheless.
This Bayern top-five goal-scorers list shows just how big a club the Bavarian giants truly are. Everyone associated with Bayern exudes a winning mentality that is rare to find elsewhere on the planet.
