Michael Fichtner, CIO of FC Bayern Munich, visited the Faculty of Computer Science at Landshut University of Applied Sciences on June 14, 2023. He started his guest visit with a university-wide and very well attended 90-minute guest lecture entitled "The digital journey of FC Bayern Munich".
As Chief Information Officer (CIO), Mr. Fichtner has been responsible for all of the club's information technology needs for almost 10 years, keeping an eye not only on the professional soccer players, but on all sports divisions. FC Bayern München e.V. itself now has a good 300,000 members, making it the sports club with the most members worldwide. Naturally, all member data is managed digitally. In addition, there are indirectly around 400,000 fan club members in 4,500 fan clubs worldwide, who are individually managed digitally.
But FC Bayern is not just a club, it is also a stock corporation. As a profitable medium-sized company, the AG maps millions of bookings for merchandising and ticketing each year on its own self-hosted IT infrastructure. The data volume for this takes up 2.5 petabaytes, i.e. 7,000 soccer fields filled with DIN A4 folders each containing 600 pages.
On the one hand, this data would of course be of interest to third parties, and on the other, FC Bayern has one or two hackers out there as opponents, despite the fact that it has so many members and fans all over the world. However, FCB has installed a strong defense not only in soccer, but also in IT.
In this respect, IT Director Fichtner's team is particularly challenged at home games: While 75,000 watch the stars play soccer in Munich's Allianz Arena, he and his IT team work in the background to ensure that visitors can park well and pay for their drinks quickly, and that the players literally don't run out of floodlights. Without IT, no professional soccer game would be possible.
There's always a lot to do, says Mr. Fichtner, and when the going gets tough, he sometimes has a screwdriver in his hand. So it's no surprise that his answer to the question of which employees he prefers to hire is: "Those who are passionate about the job and about FC Bayern München and who don't rigidly follow job descriptions. Chilled couch potatoes, on the other hand, are less suitable.
After his guest lecture, Mr. Fichtner, together with the Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science, Prof. Dr. Peter Scholz and the initiator Prof. Dr. Matthias Dorfner, will meet numerous members of the faculty to sound out joint projects and cooperation opportunities between FC Bayern-IT and the faculty. First exciting projects have already been identified, follow-up talks are planned for this summer.
Photo: Landshut University of Applied Sciences
