Hertha Berlin

The Olympiastadion in Berlin has been the home of Hertha Berlin since 1963, though it was built for far more auspicious reasons than simply hosting football matches. In We’ll tell you more about that later but, as the name of the stadium suggests, it was originally built for the Summer Olympics in 1963. During that time the capacity may well have reached over 100,000, though we haven’t included that in our records as there is no definitive proof that that was the case and it wasn’t a football match. The stadium has been used for many things over the years, being renovated in both the 1970s and after the turn of the millennium ahead of being used to host matches in the 1974 and 2006 FIFA World Cup finals. Hertha Berlin, the club that plays its matches in the Olympiastadion, has a full title of Hertha Berliner Sport Club, though it’s more commonly referred to as Hertha BSC or simply Hertha. The club was one of the founding members of the German Football Association in 1900, having been formed itself eight years earlier. Hertha’s nickname is The Old Lady, or Die Alte Dame in German, and they’ve won two Bundesliga titles in the past. On top of that, Hertha have finished as runners-up on five separate occasions. When the club was originally formed its name was BFC Hertha 92, named after a steamship that had a smokestack with blue and white stripes on; the same colours that feature on the club’s kit.