VfB Stuttgart

Also written as Stuttgart.

The club

Verein für Bewegungsspiele Stuttgart 1893 e. V. were founded on 9 September 1893 and took their present shape in a 1912 merger of Stuttgarter FV and FC Krone Cannstatt. They are one of the grand old names of German football, national champions twice before the Bundesliga existed, in 1950 and 1952, and three times since. The 2010s brought a hard fall, with relegations in 2015/16 and 2018/19, but the club rebuilt and has been back in the Bundesliga throughout the 2020s, now on a run of seven consecutive top-flight seasons. They play in white shirts with a horizontal red stripe, white shorts and white socks.

They are NOT Stuttgarter Kickers, the city's other traditional club and VfB's oldest rivals; the two first teams have not met competitively since the Kickers dropped out of the 2. Bundesliga in 1992. Nor should they be confused with VfB Stuttgart II, the club's own reserve side.

The ground is the MHPArena in Bad Cannstatt, near the Neckar, on a site first built up in 1933; capacity is 60,058.

The head coach is Sebastian Hoeneß, appointed on 3 April 2023 in succession to Bruno Labbadia, initially on a deal to 30 June 2025. He has since extended twice, first to 30 June 2027 and then to 30 June 2028, and has been in charge without interruption ever since.

Recent seasons

The Hoeneß era started at the bottom. Stuttgart finished 16th in 2022/23 and stayed up through the relegation play-off, beating Hamburger SV 3-0 at home and 3-1 away for a 6-1 aggregate. The turnaround was immediate: second in the Bundesliga in 2023/24 with 73 points from 23 wins, 4 draws and 7 defeats, with Serhou Guirassy and Deniz Undav among the most prolific scorers anywhere in Europe that season. In 2024/25 the league form sagged to ninth, 50 points from 14 wins, 8 draws and 12 defeats, 64 scored and 53 conceded, but the season ended with the DFB-Pokal. In 2025/26 they finished fourth with 62 points from 18 wins, 8 draws and 8 defeats, 71 scored and 49 conceded, qualifying for the Champions League; Undav scored 19 league goals and 25 in all competitions. Stuttgart's exact finishing position and points in 2021/22 were not established from the sources read here.

Honours and landmarks

German champions five times: 1950, 1952, 1983/84, 1991/92 and 2006/07. DFB-Pokal winners four times, in 1953/54, 1957/58, 1996/97 and 2024/25, the last of them a 4-2 win over Arminia Bielefeld at the Olympiastadion in Berlin on 24 May 2025, Nick Woltemade, Deniz Undav and Enzo Millot (twice) scoring before Julian Kania and a Josha Vagnoman own goal made the score respectable for the underdogs. Stuttgart returned to Berlin as holders a year later and lost the 2026 final 3-0 to Bayern Munich. They hold a record two UEFA Intertoto Cup wins, in 2000 and 2002, and reached two major European finals, the 1989 UEFA Cup final and the 1998 Cup Winners' Cup final, losing both. They contested the first Franz Beckenbauer Supercup on 16 August 2025, losing 2-1 at home to Bayern Munich.

Notable scorelines

The 1989 UEFA Cup final was lost 5-4 on aggregate to Diego Maradona's Napoli, 2-1 at the Stadio San Paolo and 3-3 at the Neckarstadion, one of the highest-scoring finals the competition has seen. The 6-1 aggregate over Hamburger SV in the 2023 relegation play-off saved the club's Bundesliga place and launched the current era. The biggest wins of 2025/26 were a pair of 4-0s, against Go Ahead Eagles in the Europa League and VfL Wolfsburg in the league; the heaviest defeat was 0-5 at home to Bayern Munich. Harry Kane's second-half hat-trick beat them 3-0 in the 2026 DFB-Pokal final, and Bayern beat them again, 5-1 in Munich, on the opening weekend of 2026/27. The club's all-time record win and record defeat were not established from the sources read here.

European record

Stuttgart's deepest European runs both ended in defeat in finals. In 1988/89 they reached the UEFA Cup final and lost it to Napoli over two legs, 5-4 on aggregate. In 1997/98, as cup winners, they reached the Cup Winners' Cup final at the Råsunda in Stockholm on 13 May 1998 and lost 1-0 to Chelsea, Gianfranco Zola scoring twenty seconds after coming on. In the Champions League they reached the round of sixteen in 2003/04 and again in 2009/10, and their two Intertoto Cup wins, 2000 and 2002, are a record for the competition.

The most recent campaign was the 2025/26 Europa League, entered as DFB-Pokal winners. Across twelve matches they won six and lost six, scoring 20 and conceding 15. In the knockout phase play-off they beat Celtic 4-2 on aggregate, winning 4-1 at Celtic Park on 19 February 2026 with two goals from Bilal El Khannouss and others from Jamie Leweling and Tiago Tomás, then losing the home leg 1-0 on 26 February to Luke McCowan's goal inside the first minute. FC Porto put them out of the round of sixteen 4-1 on aggregate, 2-1 in the first leg on 12 March and 2-0 in the second on 19 March 2026. Aston Villa went on to win the competition, beating SC Freiburg in the final.

Quotes

No directly quoted material was confirmed from the sources read here.

Right now (2026/27)

Sebastian Hoeneß is still the head coach, and Stuttgart are back in the Champions League as fourth-placed finishers in the Bundesliga. The league phase draw gave them Viking, Slovan Bratislava, Atlético Madrid, Galatasaray, Internazionale, Lille, Club Brugge and PSV Eindhoven, with the first match on 9 September 2026.

The season opened with a 4-0 win away to Hansa Rostock in the DFB-Pokal first round on 21 August 2026. The Bundesliga began badly, a 5-1 defeat away to Bayern Munich on 28 August, before a 4-1 home win over 1. FC Köln on 4 September left them ninth with three points from two matches. Josha Vagnoman has two league goals; Dženan Pejčinović, a 25 million euro summer signing from VfL Wolfsburg, leads the club's scoring with three in all competitions. The other headline arrivals are Bilal El Khannouss, signed permanently from Leicester City for 15 million euros after his 2025/26 loan, and Leo Sauer from Feyenoord for 12.5 million. The summer of 2025 had already brought in Tiago Tomás, Lorenz Assignon and Badredine Bouanani while Enzo Millot and Nick Woltemade left for a combined 81 million euros.

Sources

Researched and written for not4quarters. Where a fact could not be established from the sources read, this page says so rather than guessing.