after moving to composable, headless ecosystem
removes costly media management bottlenecks
with real-time, custom order image previews
empowers teams to deliver more with less
FC Bayern München AG (Bayern Munich) isn’t only one of Europe’s top football clubs, but also a big player in live and online entertainment and retail. Recently, the club replaced its legacy image and video management process for a sleek new API- and modern, headless approach. Cloudinary is core to its image and micro-video automation, managing a range of online experiences — from thrilling fans with exclusive player and stadium scenes to making team apparel purchases fast and easy.
About
Based in Munich, Bavaria, Germany, FC Bayern München AG (Bayern Munich) is one of Europe’s biggest and most successful football brands. Founded in 1900 and with an enviable trophy cabinet that includes a record 33 national German titles and 20 national cups, it also has multiple wins at the top table of professional European football. Fans and opponents alike know how seriously it takes its famous club motto of “Mia san Mia,” Bavarian for “We are who we are!”
THE CHALLENGE
Bayern Munich doesn’t just excel at football, it also nurtures millions of supporters and thousands of fan clubs around the world. The club also encourages participation in a range of other sports and pastimes, from chess to table tennis.
Consequently, Bayern Munich’s digital platforms team must cater to a wide range of fan demands — from event replay and analysis of the latest goal to its extensive TV, social media and web outreach. The digital team also has to offer world-class e-commerce to ensure fans have a winning experience when ordering the club’s popular apparel.
As the web evolved, however, the club’s legacy architecture had lost its winning ways. Older software had created too many un-optimized editorial, content, and e-commerce workflows. Bayern Munich turned to a more open, flexible approach: headless and composable, following the MACH (microservices based, API-first, cloud-native SaaS, and headless) principles for a best-of-breed, open enterprise technology ecosystem.
That new stack marks a complete upgrade from its legacy IT and content handling structure. Specifically, the club migrated to the e-commerce platform SCAYLE with Storyblok’s headless CMS, while powering the editorial platform with Bloomreach and Cloudinary’s image and video platform.
THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION
In the new ecosystem, Cloudinary is Bayern Munich’s main solution for all image and micro-video management. That includes the pitch-side and player photography and the thrilling live-action short video clips. Overall, roughly 35 editorial specialists now use the platform for content, as do five more daily users on the e-commerce side of the business.
A big time-saver for internal users is Cloudinary’s focus point support, which has radically sped up image handling. “We have to be very quick when sharing action clips, and for our editors it’s just so much more convenient and faster to deliver those assets with Cloudinary than with our previous solution,” confirms FC Bayern Munich’s digital team lead.
Cloudinary’s peerless transformations and image optimization capabilities are also proving invaluable in ensuring a superb CX for Bayern Munich’s apps on Android and iOS. They’re also vital for the club’s massive retail sportswear operation:
“The retail team wants to make it really easy for fans to buy a customized player jersey for themselves or their kids, with their favorite player name, squad number and team badge,” explains FC Bayern Munich’s leading software developer. “In practical terms, that means being able to seamlessly manipulate several layers of images. With Cloudinary, customers are now able to easily see an excellent preview of how their jersey will look.”
“Once we turned on the Media Library feature and put all our images from the content management system into Cloudinary, overnight Cloudinary became our main image delivery service. Since then, we’ve really loved all the flexibility and APIs we can get in Cloudinary, and the very strong documentation available means it’s always easy to find out what’s possible for a developer.”
—Software Developer and Project Manager, FC Bayern Munich
Cloudinary plays very well with other technologies in the club’s stack, including custom support for a widget that integrates with Bloomreach. Cloudinary also allows Bayern Munich to support new, lighter-weight image and video formats like AVIF, WebP, MP4 and MOV, which greatly improves site performance and traffic.
THE RESULTS
Now that Cloudinary is a core part of the club’s new tech ecosystem, what are the features that consistently win? It’s certain that colleagues will always get images perfectly optimized and efficiently sized for channels and fans. A recent audit showed, for example, that web traffic has gone up but overall file size has declined, thanks to efficiency driven by Cloudinary. Editorial colleagues also benefit from Cloudinary’s improved, optimized workflow.
“With Cloudinary, we keep getting the very latest codecs and image optimization techniques. That’s so cost-efficient and a great ongoing benefit for the club, as we need to send images and deliver them in a very optimized way to our users on our websites and apps. Now, we know we can do that — as well as make extensive transformations to create the different layers that lead to customized images.”
—Team Lead Digital Platforms, FC Bayern Munich
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