kicker

What is kicker?

kicker is a German sports magazine published by Olympia-Verlag GmbH of Nuremberg. The publisher states that two print editions appear every week, on Monday and on Thursday, and describes the brand as covering association football alongside ice hockey, basketball, handball and tennis.^[1] The same operation runs the website and mobile app at kicker.de.

The rhythm of the title follows the German football weekend. The Monday edition reports the completed round and the Thursday edition previews the next one, a pattern that has outlived several changes in how German football is broadcast. The Bundesliga, the competition around which most of that content is built, was founded in 1963 and its Saturday afternoon programme became the fixed point of the domestic sporting week.^[5]

Olympia-Verlag characterises the title by four stated values — competence, credibility, creativity and fairness — and describes kicker as the digital sports media brand with the widest reach in Germany.^[1] That is the publisher's own characterisation of its own product, and it is reported here as such rather than adopted.

What does kicker cover?

Association football is the core. The magazine's long-running apparatus — match reports, ratings, league tables, squad listings and the season previews issued as separate special editions — is built around the Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2, the national team and the European club competitions. Olympia-Verlag names ice hockey, basketball, handball and tennis as the further sports the brand covers.^[1]

The rights environment the title reports on is set by the Deutsche Fußball Liga's media tenders rather than by the title itself. In the award the DFL announced on 5 December 2024 for the seasons 2025-26 to 2028-29, Sky took live coverage of all Friday and Saturday Bundesliga single matches and all Bundesliga 2 matches, DAZN took the Saturday conference and all Sunday single matches, the ARD took first-showing highlights, ZDF a second showing and the top-match highlights, Sat.1 the season openers, relegation play-offs and Supercup, and RTL free live rights to the Bundesliga 2 Saturday evening top match.^[4] A printed title publishing on Monday and Thursday sits outside that live market and reports across all of it.

The publisher also states that the brand reaches more than 13 million people a month at peak times, that the mobile app draws nine million unique users a month, and that it has roughly 500,000 followers each on Facebook and on the platform formerly branded Twitter and more than a million on Instagram.^[1] These are the publisher's own figures and are not attributed by it to an audit body.

How large is kicker's audience?

Print circulation in Germany is audited by the IVW — the Informationsgemeinschaft zur Feststellung der Verbreitung von Werbeträgern — which publishes quarterly sold-circulation data for newspapers, consumer magazines and specialist titles. In its release for the second quarter of 2026, dated 21 July 2026, the IVW recorded that 312 daily and 16 weekly newspapers, 437 consumer magazines and 631 specialist titles had been submitted for audit that quarter.^[3]

The most recent title-level figure for kicker that could be retrieved is for the third quarter of 2024. The Verband Deutscher Sportjournalisten, the German sports journalists' association, reported on 21 October 2024 from the IVW data that the Monday edition sold 68,753 copies, down 5.6 per cent year on year, and the Thursday edition 62,196 copies, down 7.3 per cent; the same report gave SPORT BILD 146,630 copies, down 9.3 per cent, and 11FREUNDE 68,071, up 3.9 per cent.^[2] That is a single secondary source reporting the audit body's figures, and it is now nearly two years old. The IVW publishes title-level circulation quarterly and its most recent release covers the second quarter of 2026; no title-level kicker figure newer than the third quarter of 2024 could be retrieved for this page, and no independently audited figure for the outlet's own website could be retrieved either.

The publisher's digital reach claims set out in the previous section are therefore the only current numbers available for the brand, and they carry no audit attribution.^[1]

Since when has kicker existed?

Olympia-Verlag states that the first kicker appeared on 14 July 1920 and was published by Walther Bensemann.^[1] That is the publisher's own account of its own title's origin and is reported here with its source.

Founding and current form are separate questions. The title has been published from Nuremberg by Olympia-Verlag and appears today in the twice-weekly Monday and Thursday pattern the publisher describes; the publisher's page does not date the adoption of that frequency, and no independent source establishing the date of the change could be retrieved.^[1] The subject matter that now fills most of the magazine post-dates its founding by more than four decades: the Bundesliga was founded in 1963 and the Saturday television highlights format around it from 1965.^[5]

Why does kicker matter in Germany's sport?

It is the German-language sports title that publishes to a fixed schedule built around the domestic football calendar rather than around a broadcast window, and it is audited: the IVW figures give a measured, third-party quantity for its print distribution, which broadcast and streaming reach claims in the same market often lack.^[3][2]

Its editorial apparatus also has a documentary function. Squad lists, player ratings, league tables and season preview editions accumulate into a continuous printed record of German league football, published twice a week since long before the Bundesliga existed. For a reader trying to establish what happened in a German season, a dated twice-weekly print title with an audited circulation is a different kind of evidence from a broadcaster's highlights package, which exists for the length of a rights cycle — currently the four seasons from 2025-26 to 2028-29 for the live and highlight packages the DFL awarded on 5 December 2024.^[4]

The publisher's own claim to the widest-reaching German digital sports brand is recorded above as its claim.^[1]