It will be a premiere when the FC Bayern players play against Paris Saint-Germain (6:45 p.m. on DAZN and on YouTube) in the first leg of the Champions League this Tuesday.

Not that the Munich women were in the last eight of the most important European club competition for the first time.

It is also not the first encounter with the Parisians.

But the ambience is new.

The Bayern women are allowed to play in the Allianz Arena for the first time. According to the club, there will be more than 11,000 fans in the stadium.

This is particularly so given that the women usually play their home games at the club's own campus, in a stadium that has a capacity of 2,500 spectators.

This is usually sufficient, but in highlight games they could present themselves to a much larger audience.

When Bayern last played against PSG in 2017, also in the quarter-finals of the Champions League, they played in the stadium on Grünwalder Straße.

Back then, 7,300 spectators came, which is still the record.

Tonight he will be history.

Captain Lina Magull tells BR: "It's nice to play where your role models played back then."

“Now is the right time for it”

It's also a nice signal that FC Bayern is sending out.

A sign of appreciation for an excellent team that broke the national dominance of the Wolfsburg women last season and became German champions.

Bianca Rech, sports director for women's football at FC Bayern, says Bianca Rech has been thinking about moving to the big arena for a special game for a long time: "Now is the right time for it." So the game against PSG should be this special game, and that The framework conditions are also correct.

The opponent is a top European team and numerous spectators are allowed into the stadium again, up to 35,000 according to the specifications of the Bavarian state government.

Great willingness?

"That's important for us from a sporting point of view," says Rech, "not to play in front of empty ranks, but to feel the support of the fans." That's why a game in the arena in the past two pandemic years made little sense.

The signal effect that the arena event against PSG is supposed to have would also have had a Champions League game in an empty arena.

So the question is why this didn't happen sooner.

It wasn't the fault of the club's management, says Bianca Rech. Their willingness to give their footballers this opportunity was "very great".

Oliver Kahn, CEO of FC Bayern, even announced at the beginning of February that it was a "milestone" for the club's women's soccer department.

The team gets the stage it deserves.

Pretty much pathos.

Shouldn't it be normal by now?

A bit too much for national coach Martina Voss-Tecklenburg: "I wouldn't go that far," she says in an interview with the Tagesspiegel.

These highlight games are needed in the big arenas, said Voss-Tecklenburg, but added: "It should actually be a matter of course for teams that have this infrastructure like FC Bayern.

They just have to have that courage.”

It's not just the people of Munich who think that women deserve a big stage.

Of the eight quarter-finalists in the Champions League, only Real Madrid will not play their home game in the arena, which is otherwise reserved for men.

A look abroad is worthwhile.

He reveals that the top clubs are further elsewhere.

Olympique Lyon and Paris Saint-Germain have played in their clubs' big arenas on several occasions in recent years.