Bundesliga

The Bundesliga is the top professional division in Germany. It was founded in 1963 to replace a patchwork of regional leagues with a single national one, and shares promotion and relegation with 2. Bundesliga below it.

What most sets it apart is the ownership rule generally known as 50+1, which requires club members to hold a majority of the voting rights. Outside investors cannot take full control of a club the way they can elsewhere. The visible consequences are affordable ticket prices and the highest average attendances of any football league in the world.

Eighteen clubs play each other home and away: 34 matches per club and 306 across the season — four fewer per club than in a 20-team league.

That shorter season genuinely changes how the table reads. A single point carries more weight than it does across 38 matches, and there is less room to recover from a poor start.

Clubs level on points are separated by goal difference first, then goals scored — the Premier League's approach rather than the head-to-head-first method used in Spain and Italy.

Relegation works differently here from the other major leagues. The bottom two go down automatically to 2. Bundesliga, but the club finishing 16th is not relegated outright. It plays a two-legged play-off against the third-placed club from 2. Bundesliga, and the winner takes the Bundesliga place for the following season.

This makes 16th place unusually significant late in the season: it is the line between a second chance and an immediate drop, and it turns those two play-off legs into some of the most pressured matches in the German calendar.

At the top, the leading clubs take the UEFA places the league's coefficient earns it, and the winner of the DFB-Pokal, the domestic cup, also qualifies for Europe.

The season runs from mid-August to May around the longest winter break of the major European leagues, from late December to the middle of January.

That break shapes the season in practice. Clubs get a genuine mid-season reset to prepare and adjust their squads, and a side's form either side of it can look very different.

The tabs above separate fixtures, results and the full 18-club table with each side's last five results.

Kick-off times are converted to your local zone, and scores update on their own while matches are in progress.