United vs FC Bayern All Star Match – Fan Report Pt. 1

First off a big thank you to everyone at FC Bayern and Allianz Football who made the FCBday#1 an incredibly special day. As an Allianz employee here myself in the UK I was expecting it to be a tremendous event, however I wasn’t quite ready for the real once in a lifetime experience I had yesterday.

The day kicked off with tour around the Allianz Arena and a visit to the incredibly impressive FC Bayern museum. I don’t want to give too much away about either of these as they are truly worth doing for yourself if you are ever in Munich. What I will say is that hearing about how the stadium was constructed and maintained was genuinely interesting and seeing the sheer amount of trophies was damn impressive

The tours were really only the start of things though. Next we were shown to our seats in the press area where we had probably the most incredible view that any of the 65,000 people packed in there had. The Bayern Team 2014/15 presentation was quite the sight. It might be a cultural thing but the love and admiration the fans had for all of their players was something I don’t think would of played out similarly had United held a similar sort of presentation at Old Trafford. I almost fear some of the receptions that some members of our current squad would have got had we attempted something similar.

After the FC Bayern team presentation and training session the All-Star match was up and boy that was to watch. The match ended 3-3 with all players featuring apart from Mikael Silvestre (whose birthday it was – more on that tomorrow!), even Robbo brought himself on for 5 minutes. Andrew Cole and Paul Scholes scored for United with the latter unsurprisingly head and shoulders above anyone else on the pitch. Seemingly the United legends had much the same tactics as the Salford XI earlier in the week – pass to Scholsey, let him do the rest.

There are many better write ups on the actual match doing the rounds online so I want to move on to what was no doubt the coolest part of the whole experience – ‘The Mix Zone’. As members of the press for the day we were given full access to the area where the players give interviews to the press and we got to meet both the current day FC Bayern team and both Legends teams.

The majority of the current FC Bayern team stopped by the area to speak to the reporters and sign autographs. Special mentions have to go to Pep Guardiola, Dante, Alaba, Green, Shaqiri and Lewandoski who were all very generous with their time. I did try explaining to both Manuel Neur and Bastian Schweinstiger that it wasn’t actually a Bayern shirt they were signing for me but it was in actual fact a contract for United. I’m not sure how much they understood what I was saying but they both laughed and shook my hand … Sorry LVG I tried my best!

Tomorrow I will publish the second part of my write up about my time with the United Legends. Of course I will be announcing the winner of our #AskALegend competition so make sure you check it out.