The story of Elversberg, the team from the town of 13 thousand inhabitants challenges Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga

Elversberg, a Bundesliga debutant, will face today the giants of Bayern Munich in the championship.

Elversberg, a municipality in the south of Saarland with only 13,000 inhabitants, is the smallest town to ever host a Bundesliga team. Having neither a train station nor a community center, the town is known as “Dorfverein” – or “village club”.

Founded in 1907, dissolved during World War I and re-established in 1918, the club operated as an amateur team for most of the 20th century.

However, things changed in the early 2000s, when the local pharmaceutical company Ursapharm – initially led by Frank Holzer and then, from 2011, by his son Dominik – became its main sponsor.

Two years later, Elversberg climbed to the Third League – the third tier and the first fully professional one. The team was immediately relegated, but the company Ursapharm bought the stadium naming rights – calling it “Ursapharm-Arena an der Kaiserlinde” in honor of a century-old lime tree that had fallen in 2015 – and expanded its capacity to 10,000 seats.

A true football vision was still missing, at least until the arrival of coach Horst Steffen in 2018. His dynamic and attacking style of play enthused the fans and led to winning the Regionalliga Südwest title in the 2021–22 season.

Elversberg returned to the Third League and, this time, was ready to climb to a higher level. Steffen’s team proved this right from the start of the 2022–23 season, achieving the biggest surprise in its history: a 4–3 victory over Leverkusen in the first round of the DFB-Pokal.

Elversberg debuted in the 2nd Bundesliga in the 2024-2025 season, while in the 2025-2026 season it climbed to the elite of German football.