#1 Gerd Muller:
As Bayern Munich and Germany’s greatest forward ever, Gerd Muller’s name is written in history books as possibly the most terrifying poacher to ever grace the game. He might, though, never have had the career that he eventually conjured up if he hadn’t moved from his boyhood club TSV Nordinglen to Bayern, where he teamed up with Sepp Maier and Franz Beckenbauer for the first time.
When he first moved to the Munich-based club, they were still playing in the German second division. Muller topped the 51 goals he scored in the previous season with Nordinglen (in what was then the fifth tier of professional German football) with 33 goals in the Regionalliga for Bayern, being instrumental to their league victory and subsequent promotion to the Bundesliga.
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For the rest of his Bayern career, Muller continued banging in goals by the plenty, as he finished with 566 goals in all competitions in 15 years at the club. 365 of those were in the Bundesliga, which is still by a long shot the record for the league. In this time, Muller bagged 7 top scorer titles, including the 1971-72 season when he scored 40 in 34 games.
His impact on the Bundesliga is felt to this day, and he even appears regularly in their commercials.
