Football Tickets - Germany DFB-Pokal - 2025/2026 Season

The cup in Germany that forgives not even a moment of weakness

The DFB-Pokal in the 2025/2026 season once again looks like a competition in which the name on the shirt matters less than the night on which the game is played. One match, no second chances, no hiding behind a poor start or rotations that did not work out. As of 7 April 2026, the tournament has reached the very edge of Berlin: two semi-finals remain, Bayer Leverkusen against Bayern and VfB Stuttgart against Freiburg, while the final is scheduled for 23 May at the Olympic Stadium. This is the part of the German season when the cup is no longer an addition to the league, but a separate drama with its own heroes, its own breaking points and its own logic. Within that logic of the DFB-Pokal, there are no safe steps. Defending champions Stuttgart are still alive, Bayern once again see an open road towards the trophy that had long eluded them, Leverkusen are searching for another great spring, and Freiburg are chasing the match of their lives. All four stories are strong enough to carry a final on their own, but the cup does not ask for reputation, only for 90 minutes, sometimes 120, and not rarely for a few strikes from the penalty spot.

How the competition is structured: 64 clubs, seven steps to the trophy

The format remains one of the purest in European football. In the first round, 64 clubs take part, and the road to the trophy runs through seven rounds. There are no second legs, no aggregate scoring; everything is decided in a single night. If there is no winner after 90 minutes, extra time is played, then penalties.

• 1st round: 64 clubs, 32 matches
• 2nd round: 32 clubs, 16 matches
• round of 16: 16 clubs, 8 matches
• quarter-finals: 8 clubs, 4 matches
• semi-finals: 4 clubs, 2 matches
• final: 2 clubs, 1 match

In the first round, 36 clubs from the Bundesliga and 2. Bundesliga take part, along with 21 winners of regional cups and the four best teams from the 3. Liga, plus three more places belonging to the regional associations with the highest number of men's clubs. That is why the DFB-Pokal is always a mixture of the top and the periphery, glamour and old stands, million-euro squads and semi-amateur outsiders dreaming of the night for which decades are remembered. The first round was played from 15 to 18 August 2025, with two postponed matches on 26 and 27 August. The second round fell at the end of October, the round of 16 at the beginning of December, the quarter-finals in February 2026, and the semi-finals are scheduled for 22 and 23 April. The final remains in the slot that German football preserves almost like a ritual: Berlin in May.

Who was in the draw and who is still alive

The breadth of participants was once again the trademark of the competition this season. The cup included Bayern München, Bayer Leverkusen, Borussia Dortmund, RB Leipzig, VfB Stuttgart, SC Freiburg, Eintracht Frankfurt, Werder Bremen, Union Berlin, Borussia Mönchengladbach, Mainz 05, Wolfsburg, Hoffenheim, Augsburg, St. Pauli, Heidenheim, as well as giants and former Bundesliga clubs from lower divisions such as Hamburger SV, Hertha BSC, 1. FC Köln, Schalke 04, Karlsruher, Darmstadt, Nürnberg, Kaiserslautern, Magdeburg and Eintracht Braunschweig. Also in the spotlight were the kinds of clubs the DFB-Pokal especially loves: Rot-Weiss Essen, Arminia Bielefeld, Preußen Münster, Wehen Wiesbaden, Dynamo Dresden, Saarbrücken, Schweinfurt 05, Lok Leipzig, BFC Dynamo, Bahlinger SC, FK Pirmasens and others. In the end, however, four clubs reached the final stage, representing four different football accents.

• Bayer Leverkusen – technically the calmest team among the remaining four, with a habit of turning cup nights into control of the rhythm.
• Bayern München – the record-holder of the competition and a club that enters every edition with the idea that anything short of the trophy is a deficit.
• VfB Stuttgart – defending champions, the team that lifted the trophy in Berlin last year and is now trying to confirm that it was not an isolated flash.
• SC Freiburg – a club that often looks in the cup as though the format suits it perfectly: compact, hard, tactically mature and ready to live on the edge.

That is why this final stage has no intruder. There is no third-division fairy tale like last season with Arminia Bielefeld, but there is a very clean collision of styles and ambitions: Bayern against Leverkusen as a match that could easily stand in the latter stages of Europe, and Stuttgart against Freiburg as a southern German derby full of intensity and history.

The road to the semi-finals: how the last four reached April

Leverkusen reached the last four with a 3:0 victory against St. Pauli in the quarter-finals. It was not a match in which the cup demanded a miracle, but the kind of night when the favourite leaves no cracks and simply extinguishes the opponent's hope before it turns into momentum. For a club that in recent seasons has become used to playing big matches, it was progress achieved without excessive drama. Bayern secured their place in the semi-finals with a 2:0 win over RB Leipzig. Such matches in the DFB-Pokal regularly carry the weight of a final before the final, because on one side stands the record-holder of the competition, and on the other a club that in recent years has known very well how to seriously shake the Bavarian plan. Bayern came through firmly this time, with a Harry Kane penalty and a goal by Luis Díaz, so they enter April with the feeling that the cup is opening up to them again. Stuttgart beat Holstein 3:0 in Kiel. The result sounds convincing, but the match was not a stroll from the first minute. The defending champions broke the contest only after the interval, and then the difference in quality became visible through goals by Deniz Undav, Chris Führich and Atakan Karazor. For a team that already knew what it looks like to finish the job in Berlin, it was progress stamped with seriousness. Freiburg, perhaps most dramatically, came through Berlin after a shoot-out against Hertha. After 1:1 following 120 minutes, they won 5:4 on penalties in a match watched by more than 56 thousand people at the Olympic Stadium. Victories like that often change the psychology of a tournament. A club that survives a night in which everything could have gone either way begins to believe that the cup really can end in its colours.

The 2026 semi-finals: two matches, two completely different films

The first semi-final is played on 22 April in Leverkusen: Bayer Leverkusen against Bayern. It is a match in which every detail carries weight. At home, Leverkusen seek a game without the Bavarian surge and without open space for Bayern's bursts. Bayern, on the other hand, traditionally try in such matches to establish authority as early as possible, as if sending the message that they want to suffocate cup uncertainty before it appears. The second semi-final is played on 23 April in Stuttgart: VfB Stuttgart against SC Freiburg. On paper less glamorous than the first, but in cup logic perhaps even more dangerous. It is a Baden-Württemberg duel in which nobody needs to explain the context to anyone. Stuttgart carry the status of reigning winners, Freiburg carry the hunger of a club that feels that this may be its greatest domestic opening in recent years. Such matches rarely stay cold.

• 22 April 2026, 20:45: Bayer Leverkusen – Bayern München
• 23 April 2026, 20:45: VfB Stuttgart – SC Freiburg
• 23 May 2026, 20:00: final, Olympiastadion Berlin

Final-stage stadiums: Leverkusen, Stuttgart and Berlin

In the final stage, the cup is always also played against space. It is not the same to arrive at a stadium of around thirty thousand seats where the crowd is literally on the edge of the pitch, or at the huge stage in Berlin where the final looks like a national holiday of football.

• BayArena, Leverkusen – Leverkusen; capacity 30,210. A compact stadium that knows how to intensify home control of a match because the rhythm of the stands quickly reaches the pitch.
• MHPArena, Stuttgart – Stuttgart; around 60,000 seats after completed renovations. It is now an arena that can carry both a great European atmosphere and raw cup nervousness.
• Europa-Park Stadion, Freiburg – Freiburg; 34,700 seats. Freiburg will not use it in the semi-final this time because they are away, but it remains an important part of the story of a club that has further strengthened its identity in the new home.
• Olympiastadion, Berlin – Berlin; around 74,000 seats. The final is there, and there the DFB-Pokal has long taken on its most recognisable image.

Berlin is a special category. The men's DFB-Pokal final has been played there since 1985, and at the beginning of 2026 it was confirmed that this will remain the case at least until 2030. That means the cup still preserves one of the few European finals that did not wander after money, but remained tied to the same city and the same stadium. At a time when much in football moves and changes, that constancy carries weight.

What history says: who ruled the cup and who wrote the sensations

When speaking about the DFB-Pokal, the first figure is always Bayern's. The Bavarian club is the record-holder with 20 titles won. Behind them are Werder Bremen with six, Borussia Dortmund and Eintracht Frankfurt with five each, while Stuttgart, with last year's victory, reached a fourth trophy. Bayer Leverkusen are on two titles, Freiburg are still waiting for their first major cup strike of that kind. But the DFB-Pokal was never just a list of the strongest. It is also a competition in which those who did not lift the trophy, but shook the order, are remembered for a long time. Last season Arminia Bielefeld, as a third-division club, reached the final and on that run eliminated elite clubs before losing 4:2 to Stuttgart in Berlin. It was a reminder that in Germany the cup can still swallow hierarchy and that the story does not have to come only from the top of the Bundesliga. The history of finals in Berlin is also full of unusual details. The highest recorded attendance of a final in that period was 76,500 spectators in 1989, when Borussia Dortmund beat Werder 4:1. In 40 Berlin finals there were also penalty shoot-outs, own goals, great comebacks, but also many matches in which the scenography itself did half the work of the story. The DFB-Pokal final in Berlin is not just a match; it is almost a separate genre of German football.

Last season as an introduction to this one: Stuttgart's trophy and the trace that remained

On 24 May 2025, VfB Stuttgart beat Arminia Bielefeld 4:2 in the final in front of 74,036 spectators. It was a final that for a long time looked one-way on the scoreboard, because Stuttgart got away early, but it ended lively enough for the match to remain in memory. Nick Woltemade, Enzo Millot and Deniz Undav marked the attacking part of the evening, and Stuttgart took their fourth cup title. For this season, that is an important frame. Stuttgart are defending not only the trophy, but also the feeling that they have once again become a cup team. A club that regularly goes deep into the tournament over a span of several years is no longer a случайный passer-by. That is why the semi-final with Freiburg carries not only the weight of one match, but also a test of whether the reigning winners can turn their story into a sequence.

Why the DFB-Pokal is so harsh on favourites

The German cup is brutal towards favourites precisely because the format is simple. There is no room for a controlled slip. In the league, a bad day can still be healed the following weekend; in the cup, one misjudged duel, one red card, one evening in which the home second-division side outruns everything, and the favourite is finished. That was visible this season as well. Hertha pushed Freiburg to penalties. Holstein Kiel forced Stuttgart to break the quarter-final match only in the second half. St. Pauli had the chance to measure themselves against Leverkusen on the big stage. In earlier rounds, clubs from lower leagues once again earned their nights under the floodlights. That is why the DFB-Pokal is perhaps the fairest competition to watch, and the cruellest to play. Another important dimension is money. The DFB has retained a fund of 67 million euros for distribution from the first round to the semi-finals, with an additional 7.2 million for the final alone. For big clubs, that is not a decisive budget pillar, but for small and medium-sized clubs the cup can be a seasonal turning point. That is why in these matches they play not only for the trophy, but also for space, prestige, stability and next summer.

Details that give colour to this season

This edition of the DFB-Pokal so far has several clear motifs. The first is Bayern's return to a zone in which the cup no longer looks like a side trophy, but like a concrete goal. The second is Stuttgart's persistence in remaining relevant after winning the title, which is often harder than reaching the first celebration. The third is Freiburg's resilience, because teams that survive a quarter-final on penalties know how to become dangerous precisely because a feeling opens up to them that the tournament is waiting for them. The fourth is Leverkusen's attempt to turn cup seriousness into routine, and that may be the hardest step of all. On the individual level, the cup has already given several striking moments: Harry Kane scored against Leipzig in the quarter-finals, Luis Díaz then closed the story; Undav, Führich and Karazor took Stuttgart past Kiel; Yuito Suzuki scored for Freiburg in the Berlin drama before penalties decided the progress. The DFB-Pokal often asks great names for only one move, and supporting characters for one evening because of which they will be remembered for years.

What the 2025/2026 season actually means in this cup

On the date of 7 April 2026, the DFB-Pokal is at a stage where there is no more fog. The draw is clear, the schedule is clear, the stage for Berlin is ready. Bayer Leverkusen, Bayern München, VfB Stuttgart and SC Freiburg remain. One of them will lift the trophy under the Berlin sky on 23 May, and the story up to that moment already now has enough substance to be remembered: the defending champions are still breathing, the record-holder seeks another confirmation, Leverkusen want another major domestic trophy, and Freiburg are chasing progress from the category of beautiful seasons into the category of historic seasons. That is also the reason why the DFB-Pokal still has such a strong pulse. It is not a tournament that lives from advertising about tradition, but from real matches that year after year offer something the league often cannot: an immediate verdict. In Germany, the cup is not won through the table, but through evenings. And in the 2025/2026 season, only three such evenings remain.